Conditions for Facelike Expertise With Objects

Compared with other objects, faces are processed more holistically and with a larger reliance on configural information. Such hallmarks efface processing can also be found for nonface objects as people develop expertise with them. Is this specifically a result of expertise individuating objects, or would any type of prolonged intensive experience with objects be sufficient? Two groups of participants were trained with artificial objects (Ziggerins). One group learned to rapidly individuate Ziggerins (i.e., subordinate-level training). The other group learned rapid, sequential categorizations at the basic level. Individuation experts showed a selective improvement at the subordinate level and an increase in holistic processing. Categorization experts improved only at the basic level, showing no changes in holistic processing. Attentive exposure to objects in a difficult training regimen is not sufficient to produce facelike expertise. Rather, qualitatively different types of expertise with objects of a given geometry can arise depending on the type of training.

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title: What is "special" about face perception?
abstract: There is growing evidence that face recognition is "special" but less certainty concerning the way in which it is special. The authors review and compare previous proposals and their own more recent hypothesis, that faces are recognized "holistically" (i.e., using relatively less part decomposition than other types of objects). This hypothesis, which can account for a variety of data from experiments on face memory, was tested with 4 new experiments on face perception. A selective attention paradigm and a masking paradigm were used to compare the perception of faces with the perception of inverted faces, words, and houses. Evidence was found of relatively less part-based shape representation for faces. The literatures on machine vision and single unit recording in monkey temporal cortex are also reviewed for converging evidence on face representation. The neuropsychological literature is reviewed for-evidence on the question of whether face representation differs in degree or kind from the representation of other types of objects.

title: Unraveling mechanisms for expert object recognition: bridging brain activity and behavior.
abstract: Behavioral sensitivity to object transformations and the response to novel objects (Greebles) in the fusiform face area (FFA) was measured several times during expertise training. Sensitivity to 3 transformations increased with expertise: (a) configural changes in which halves of objects were misaligned, (b) configural changes in which some of the object parts were moved, and (c) the substitution of an object part with a part from a different object. The authors found that holistic-configural effects can arise from object representations that are differentiated in terms of features or parts. Moreover, a holistic-inclusive effect was correlated with changes in the right FFA. Face recognition may not be unique in its reliance on holistic processing, measured in terms of both behavior and brain activation.

title: Holistic processing of faces: perceptual and decisional components.
abstract: Researchers have used several composite face paradigms to assess holistic processing of faces. In the selective attention paradigm, participants decide whether one face part (e.g., top) is the same as a previously seen face part. Their judgment is affected by whether the irrelevant part of the test face is the same as or different than the relevant part of the study face. This failure of selective attention implies holistic processing. However, the authors show that this task alone cannot distinguish between perceptual and decisional sources of holism. The distinction can be addressed by the complete identification paradigm, in which both face parts are judged to be same or different, combined with analyses based on general recognition theory (F. G. Ashby & J. T. Townsend, 1986). The authors used a different paradigm, sequential responses, to relate these 2 paradigms empirically and theoretically. Sequential responses produced the same results as did selective attention and complete identification. Moreover, disruptions of holistic processing by systematic misalignment of the faces corresponded with systematic and significant changes in the decisional components, but not in the perceptual components, that were extracted using general recognition theory measures. This finding suggests a significant decisional component of holistic face processing in the composite face task.

title: Why faces are and are not special: an effect of expertise.
abstract: Recognition memory for faces is hampered much more by inverted presentation than is memory for any other material so far examined. The present study demonstrates that faces are not unique with regard to this vulnerability to inversion. The experiments also attempt to isolate the source of the inversion effect. In one experiment, use of stimuli (landscapes) in which spatial relations among elements are potentially important distinguishing features is shown not to guarantee a large inversion effect. Two additional experiments show that for dog experts sufficiently knowledgeable to individuate dogs of the same breed, memory for photographs of dogs of that breed is as disrupted by inversion as is face recognition. A final experiment indicates that the effect of orientation on memory for faces does not depend on inability to identify single features of these stimuli upside down. These experiments are consistent with the view that experts represent items in memory in terms of distinguishing features of a different kind than do novices. Speculations as to the type of feature used and neuropsychological and developmental implications of this accomplishment are offered.

title: Features and their configuration in face recognition
abstract: Tanaka and Farah (1993) have proposed a holistic approach to face recognition in which information about the features of a face and their configuration are combined together in the face representation. An implication of the holistic hypothesis is that alterations in facial configuration should interfere with retrieval of features. In four experiments, the effect of configuration on feature recognition was investigated by creating two configurations of a face, one with eyes close together and one with eyes far apart. After subjects studied faces presented in one of the two configurations (eyes-close or eyes-far), they were tested for their recognition of features shown in isolation, in a new face configuration, and in the old face configuration. It was found that subjects recognized features best when presented in the old configuration, next best in the new configuration, and poorest in isolation. Moreover, subjects were not sensitive to configural information in inverted faces (Experiment 2) or nonface stimuli (i.e., houses; Experiments 3 and 4). Importantly, for normal faces, altering the spatial location of the eyes not only impaired subjects’ recognition of the eye features but also impaired their recognition of the nose and mouth features—features whose spatial locations were not directly altered. These findings emphasize the interdependency of featural and configural information in a holistic face representation.

title: Can generic expertise explain special processing for faces?
abstract: Does face recognition involve face-specific cognitive and neural processes ('domain specificity') or do faces only seem special because people have had more experience of individuating them than they have of individuating members of other homogeneous object categories ('the expertise hypothesis')? Here, we summarize new data that test these hypotheses by assessing whether classic face-selective effects - holistic processing, recognition impairments in prosopagnosia and fusiform face area activation - remain face selective in comparison with objects of expertise. We argue that evidence strongly supports domain specificity rather than the expertise hypothesis. We conclude that the crucial social function of face recognition does not reflect merely a general practice phenomenon and that it might be supported by evolved mechanisms (visual or nonvisual) and/or a sensitive period in infancy.

title: Impairment in Holistic Face Processing Following Early Visual Deprivation
abstract: Unlike most objects, faces are processed holistically: They are processed as a whole rather than as a collection of independent features. We examined the role of early visual experience in the development of this type of processing of faces by using the composite-face task, a measure of holistic processing, to test patients deprived of visual experience during infancy. Visually normal control subjects showed the expected composite-face effect: They had difficulty perceiving that the top halves of two faces were the same when the top halves were aligned with different bottom halves. Performance improved when holistic processing was disrupted by misaligning the top and bottom halves. Deprived patients, in contrast, showed no evidence of holistic processing, and in fact performed significantly better than control subjects when top and bottom halves were aligned. These findings suggest that early visual experience is necessary to set up or maintain the neural substrate that leads to holistic processing of faces.

title: Local and Relational Aspects of Face Distinctiveness
abstract: Distinctiveness contributes strongly to the recognition and rejection of faces in memory tasks. In four experiments we examine the role played by local and relational information in the distinctiveness of upright and inverted faces. In all experiments subjects saw one of three versions of a face: original faces, which had been rated as average in distinctiveness in a previous study (Hancock, Burton, & Bruce, 1996), a more distinctive version in which local features had been changed (D-local), and a more distinctive version in which relational features had been changed (D-rel). An increase in distinctiveness was found for D-local and D-rel faces in Experiment 1 (complete faces) and 3 and 4 (face internals only) when the faces had to be rated in upright presentation, but the distinctiveness of the D-rel faces was reduced much more than that of the D-local versions when the ratings were given to the faces presented upside-down (Experiments 1 and 3). Recognition performance showed a similar pattern: presented upright, both D-local and D-rel revealed higher performance compared to the originals, but in upside-down presentation the D-local versions showed a much stronger distinctiveness advantage. When only internal features of faces were used (Experiments 3 and 4), the D-rel faces lost their advantage over the Original versions in inverted presentation. The results suggest that at least two dimensions of facial information contribute to a face's apparent distinctiveness, but that these sources of information are differentially affected by turning the face upside-down. These findings are in accordance with a face processing model in which face inversion effects occur because a specific type of information processing is disrupted, rather than because of a general disruption of performance.

title: When Inverted Faces are Recognized: The Role of Configural Information in Face Recognition
abstract: The identification of upright faces seems to involve a special sensitivity to “configural” information, the processing of which is less effective when the face is inverted. However the precise meaning of “configural” remains unclear. Five experiments are presented, which showed that the disruption of the processing of relational, rather than holistic, information largely determines the occurrence as well as the size of the face-inversion effect. In Experiment 1, faces could be identified either by unique combinations of local information (e.g. a specific eye colour plus hair colour) or by unique relational information (e.g. nose-mouth distance). The former showed no inversion effect, whereas the latter did. A combination of local and relational information (Experiment 2) again produced an inversion effect, although this effect was smaller than that found when only relational information was used. The results were replicated in Experiment 3 when differences in the brightness of local features were used instead of specific colour combinations. Experiment 4 used different retrieval conditions to distinguish relational from holistic processing, and demonstrated again that spatial relations between single features appeared to provide crucial information for face recognition. In Experiment 5, the importance of relational information was confirmed using faces that also varied in the shapes of local features.

title: Configural Face Processing Develops more Slowly than Featural Face Processing
abstract: Expertise in face processing takes many years to develop. To determine the contribution of different face-processing skills to this slow development, we altered a single face so as to create sets of faces designed to measure featural, configural, and contour processing. Within each set, faces differed only in the shape of the eyes and mouth (featural set), only in the spacing of the eyes and mouth (spacing set), or only in the shape of the external contour (contour set). We presented adults, and children aged 6, 8, and 10 years, with pairs of upright and inverted faces and instructed them to indicate whether the two faces were the same or different. Adults showed a larger inversion effect for the spacing set than for the featural and external contour sets, confirming that the spacing set taps configural processing. On the spacing set, all groups of children made more errors than adults. In contrast, on the external contour and featural sets, children at all ages were almost as accurate as adults, with no significant difference beginning at age 6 on the external contour set and beginning at age 10 on the featural set. Overall, the results indicate that adult expertise in configural processing is especially slow to develop.

title: Inversion and processing of component and spatial-relational information in faces.
abstract: This study compared effects of inversion on perceptual processing of faces with distorted components (eyes and mouths) and faces distorted by altering spatial relations between components. In a rating task, participants inversion reduced the rated grotesqueness of spatially distorted faces but not that of faces with altered components. In a comparison task, pairs of faces were shown side by side; participants judged whether they were identical or different. Inversion greatly reduced the rate at which participants responded within 3 s to pairs that differed spatially, but not pairs that differed componentially. Also, latencies for detecting spatial differences were lengthened by inversion more than latencies for detecting componential differences. Results support the hypothesis that inversion impairs encoding of spatial-relational information more than, or instead of, componential information, depending on the task.

title: Becoming a “Greeble” Expert: Exploring Mechanisms for Face Recognition
abstract: Sensitivity to configural changes in face processing has been cited as evidence for face-exclusive mechanisms. Alternatively, general mechanisms could be fine-tuned by experience with homogeneous stimuli. We tested sensitivity to configural transformations for novices and experts with nonface stimuli ("Greebles"). Parts of transformed Greebles were identified via forced-choice recognition. Regardless of expertise level, the recognition of parts in the Studied configuration was better than in isolation, suggesting an object advantage. For experts, recognizing Greeble parts in a Transformed configuration was slower than in the Studied configuration, but only at upright. Thus, expertise with visually similar objects, not faces per se, may produce configural sensitivity.

title: Perceptual interference supports a non-modular account of face processing
abstract: The perception of faces and of nonface objects share common early visual processing stages. Some argue, however, that the brain eventually processes faces separately from other objects, within a domain-specific module dedicated to face perception. This apparent specialization for faces could, alternatively, result from people's expertise with this category of stimuli. Here we used behavioral and electrophysiological measures of interference to address the functional independence of face and object processing. If the expert processing of faces and cars depend on common mechanisms related to holistic perception (obligatory processing of all parts), then for human subjects who are presumed to be face experts, car perception should interfere with concurrent face perception. Furthermore, such interference should increase with greater expertise in car identification, and indeed this is what we found. Event-related potentials (ERPs) suggest that this interference arose from perceptual processes contributing to the holistic processing of both objects of expertise and faces.

title: Should we reject the expertise hypothesis?
abstract: On the basis of a review of the literature and the results of three experiments with dog experts, Robbins and McKone [Robbins, R. A., & McKone, E. (2006). No face-like processing for objects-of-expertise in three behavioural tasks, Cognition] argue that there is little or no evidence supporting an expertise account of the differences in configural processing that are typically observed between faces and non-face objects. In the spirit of a debate that has become overly polarized, we believe that R&M often emphasized relatively unimportant controversial issues at the expense of bigger, more important questions. We also feel that some of R&M's arguments are rooted in methodological confusions that should be clarified because they have implications beyond this specific debate. In this commentary, we first clarify issues surrounding the proper statistical analysis of the composite paradigm, a methodology that is commonly used to assess configural and holistic effects in both face and non-face objects. We then discuss several theoretical issues that we feel are central to the debate regarding accounts of face-specificity. We also briefly review positive evidence for the correlation between measures of behavioral expertise and neural markers of face-selectivity. Unlike R&M, we believe the positive evidence for expertise effects, both behavioral and neural, greatly outweighs evidence stemming from null results and that it clearly motivates the importance of future work on the role of experience in the specialization of visual cortex.

title: Beyond faces and modularity: the power of an expertise framework
abstract: Studies of perceptual expertise typically ask whether the mechanisms underlying face recognition are domain specific or domain general. This debate has so dominated the literature that it has masked the more general usefulness of the expertise framework for studying the phenomenon of category specialization. Here we argue that the value of an expertise framework is not solely dependent on its relevance to face recognition. Beyond offering an alternative to domain-specific accounts of face specialization in terms of interactions between experience, task demands, and neural biases, expertise studies reveal principles of perceptual learning that apply to many different domains and forms of expertise. As such the expertise framework provides a unique window onto the functional plasticity of the mind and brain.

title: Font Tuning Associated with Expertise in Letter Perception
abstract: Font tuning (FT) occurs when observers recognize a sequence of letters presented in the same font faster than in different fonts (Sanocki 1987, 1988 Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 13 267–278; 14 472–480). Here, we test the hypothesis that FT is associated with expertise with a specific writing system. We developed a systematic search task allowing the measurement of FT over a large number of letters and generalized the finding of FT from English readers viewing Roman letters to Chinese readers viewing Chinese characters. Non-Chinese readers did not show evidence of FT for Chinese characters in this search task. We also used a simpler 3-letter identification task to directly compare novice and expert readers, and to explore FT for different aspects of font such as fill, slant, and aspect ratio. We found that experts tune to aspect ratio but not to the other font changes. These findings reveal that letters are not processed visually in the same manner as shapes, and suggest an explanation for the cortical specialization obtained in the visual system for letters.

title: The entry point of face recognition: evidence for face expertise.
abstract: Previous studies have shown that experts (e.g., birdwatchers) are as fast to recognize objects at subordinate levels of abstraction (e.g., robin) as they are to recognize the same object at the basic level (e.g., bird). As a test of face expertise, the current study found that adults identify faces more frequently (Experiment 1) and as quickly (Experiment 2) at the subordinate level (e.g., Bill Clinton) as at the basic level (e.g., human). Whereas brief presentation (75 ms) impaired subordinate-level recognition of nonface objects, it did not impair the subordinate level recognition of faces (Experiment 3). Finally, in an identity-matching task, subordinate-level primes facilitated the matching responses of faces but not nonface objects (Experiment 4). Collectively, these results indicate that face expertise, like expert object expertise, promotes a downward shift in recognition to more subordinate levels of abstraction.

title: Object categories and expertise: Is the basic level in the eye of the beholder?
abstract: Classic research on conceptual hierarchies has shown that the interaction be- tween the human perceiver and objects in the environment specifies one level of abstraction for categorizing objects, called the basic level, which plays a primary role in cognition. The question of whether the special psychological status of the basic level can be modified by experience was addressed in three experiments comparing the performance of subjects in expert and novice domains. The main findings were that in the domain of expertise (a) subordinate-level categories were as differentiated as the basic-level categories, (b) subordinate-level names were used as frequently as basic-level names for identifying objects, and(c) subordinate- level categorizations were as fast as basic-level categorizations. Taken together, these results demonstrate that individual differences in domain-specific knowl- edge affect the extent that the basic level is central to categorization. 8 1991 Ara&mir Prccr.

title: Basic objects in natural categories
abstract: Categorizations which humans make of the concrete world are not arbitrary but highly determined. In taxonomies of concrete objects, there is one level of abstraction at which the most basic category cuts are made. Basic categories are those which carry the most information, possess the highest category cue validity, and are, thus, the most differentiated from one another. The four experiments of Part I define basic objects by demonstrating that in taxonomies of common concrete nouns in English based on class inclusion, basic objects are the most inclusive categories whose members: (a) possess significant numbers of attributes in common, (b) have motor programs which are similar to one another, (c) have similar shapes, and (d) can be identified from averaged shapes of members of the class. The eight experiments of Part II explore implications of the structure of categories. Basic objects are shown to be the most inclusive categories for which a concrete image of the category as a whole can be formed, to be the first categorizations made during perception of the environment, to be the earliest categories sorted and earliest named by children, and to be the categories most codable, most coded, and most necessary in language.

title: An analysis of letter expertise in a levels-of-categorization framework
abstract: While there has been increasing effort in dissociating the neural substrates recruited by perception of different objects, the theoretical and behavioural work needed to understand such dissociation lags behind. In an attempt to compare expertise in letter and face perception, we outline a theoretical framework that characterizes different types of object expertise based on the task demand (level of abstraction) required in object categorization. Face perception requires categorization at a subordinate level, whereas letter perception involves mainly basic-level categorization. Accordingly face and letter perception should represent two different types of expertise and display different neural and behavioural markers. Results from three behavioural experiments supported the predictions of the framework in that letter expertise is characterized by an enhancement of the basic-level advantage, instead of its attenuation as typically found for face perception. We compare this framework with Farah's taxonomy of visual abilities based on cooccurrence of deficits in visual agnosias.

title: Activation of Face Expertise and the Inversion Effect
abstract: We used a contextual priming paradigm to examine top-down influences on the face-inversion effect. Adult participants were primed with either faces or Chinese characters and then tested on ambiguous figures that could be perceived as either faces or Chinese characters, dependent on the priming condition. The ambiguous figures differed from one another in their configural information, which is crucial for processing faces but not Chinese characters. The inversion effect was observed in the face-priming condition, but not in the character-priming condition. The present results provide the first direct evidence that top-down activation of the face-processing expertise system plays a crucial role in the face-inversion effect.

title: Not All Visual Expertise Is Holistic, but It May Be Leftist
abstract: We examined whether two purportedly face-specific effects, holistic processing and the left-side bias, can also be observed in expert-level processing of Chinese characters, which are logographic and share many properties with faces. Non-Chinese readers (novices) perceived these characters more holistically than Chinese readers (experts). Chinese readers had a better awareness of the components of characters, which were not clearly separable to novices. This finding suggests that holistic processing is not a marker of general visual expertise; rather, holistic processing depends on the features of the stimuli and the tasks typically performed on them. In contrast, results for the left-side bias were similar to those obtained in studies of face perception. Chinese readers exhibited a left-side bias in the perception of mirror-symmetric characters, whereas novices did not; this effect was also reflected in eye fixations. Thus, the left-side bias may be a marker of visual expertise.

title: Negative and positive congruence effects in letters and shapes
abstract: In six experiments in which a binary classification task was used, letter and nonletter (geometrical shapes, pseudoletters, or rotated letters) targets were presented either in isolation or surrounded by a geometrical shape. The surrounding shape could be congruent or incongruent with the target. When the classification required a distinction between letters and nonletters, either explicitly (Experiments 1–3) or implicitly (Experiment 4), a negative congruence effect was obtained for letters, contrasting with a regular, positive congruence effect for nonletters. When no distinction was to be made, letters and nonletters invariably showed a positive congruence effect (Experiments 5 and 6). In particular, between Experiments 1–4 and Experiments 5 and 6, the occurrence of negative or positive congruence effects for the same stimuli depended on the task. Feature interaction, target selection, and response competition explanations were tested against a feature integration approach. The results are explained in terms of different feature integration strategies for letters and nonletters.

title: Parts, Wholes, and Context in Reading: A Triple Dissociation
abstract: Research in object recognition has tried to distinguish holistic recognition from recognition by parts. One can also guess an object from its context. Words are objects, and how we recognize them is the core question of reading research. Do fast readers rely most on letter-by-letter decoding (i.e., recognition by parts), whole word shape, or sentence context? We manipulated the text to selectively knock out each source of information while sparing the others. Surprisingly, the effects of the knockouts on reading rate reveal a triple dissociation. Each reading process always contributes the same number of words per minute, regardless of whether the other processes are operating.

title: N170 ERPs could represent a logographic processing strategy in visual word recognition
abstract: BackgroundOccipito-temporal N170 component represents the first step where face, object and word processing are discriminated along the ventral stream of the brain. N170 leftward asymmetry observed during reading has been often associated to prelexical orthographic visual word form activation. However, some studies reported a lexical frequency effect for this component particularly during word repetition that appears in contradiction with this prelexical orthographic step. Here, we tested the hypothesis that under word repetition condition, discrimination between words would be operated on visual rather than orthographic basis. In this case, N170 activity may correspond to a logographic processing where a word is processed as a whole.MethodsTo test such an assumption, frequent words, infrequent words and pseudowords were presented to the subjects that had to complete a visual lexical decision task. Different repetition conditions were defined 1 – weak repetition, 2 – massive repetition and 3 – massive repetition with font alternation. This last condition was designed to change visual word shape during repetition and therefore to interfere with a possible visual strategy during word recognition.ResultsBehavioral data showed an important frequency effect for the weak repetition condition, a lower but significant frequency effect for massive repetition, and no frequency effect for the changing font repetition. Moreover alternating font repetitions slowed subject's responses in comparison to "simple" massive repetition.ERPs results evidenced larger N170 amplitude in the left hemisphere for frequent than both infrequent words and pseudowords during massive repetition. Moreover, when words were repeated with different fonts this N170 effect was not present, suggesting a visual locus for such a N170 frequency effect.ConclusionN170 represents an important step in visual word recognition, consisting probably in a prelexical orthographic processing. But during the reading of very frequent words or after a massive repetition of a word, it could represent a more holistic process where words are processed as a global visual pattern.

title: Effects of long-term object familiarity on event-related potentials in the monkey.
abstract: Although some change in the neural representation of an object must occur as it becomes familiar, the nature of this change is not fully understood. In humans, it has been shown that the N170-an evoked visual potential-is enhanced for classes of objects for which people have visual expertise. In this study, we explored whether monkeys show a similar modulation in event-related potential (ERP) amplitude as a result of long-term familiarity by recording ERPs with chronically implanted electrodes over extended training periods spanning many sessions. In each of 3 experiments, we found larger amplitude visual evoked responses to highly familiar images for the time period of 120-250 ms after stimulus onset. This difference was found when the monkeys were trained in an individual-level discrimination task, in a task that required only color discrimination, and even following a viewing-only task. We thus observed this familiarity effect across several tasks and different object categories and further found that the difference between "familiar" and "novel" became smaller as the animals gained experience with the previously unfamiliar objects across multiple test sessions. These data suggest that changes in visual responses associated with familiarity are evident early in the evoked visual response, are robust, and may be automatic, driven at least in part by repeated object exposure.

title: A Reevaluation of the Electrophysiological Correlates of Expert Object Processing
abstract: Subordinate-level object processing is regarded as a hallmark of perceptual expertise. However, the relative contribution of subordinate- and basic-level category experience in the acquisition of perceptual expertise has not been clearly delineated. In this study, participants learned to classify wading birds and owls at either the basic (e.g., wading bird, owl) or the subordinate (e.g., egret, snowy owl) level. After 6 days of training, behavioral results showed that subordinate-level but not basic-level training improved subordinate discrimination of trained exemplars, novel exemplars, and exemplars from novel species. Event-related potentials indicated that both basic- and subordinate-level training enhanced the early N170 component, but only subordinate-level training amplified the later N250 component. These results are consistent with models positing separate basic and subordinate learning mechanisms, and, contrary to perspectives attempting to explain visual expertise solely in terms of subordinate-level processing, suggest that expertise enhances neural responses of both basic and subordinate processing.

title: The Training and Transfer of Real-World Perceptual Expertise
abstract: A hallmark of perceptual expertise is that experts classify objects at a more specific, subordinate level of abstraction than novices. To what extent does subordinate-level learning contribute to the transfer of perceptual expertise to novel exemplars and novel categories? In this study, participants learned to classify 10 varieties of wading birds and 10 varieties of owls at either the subordinate, species (e.g., “great blue crown heron,” “eastern screech owl”) or the family (“wading bird,” “owl”) level of abstraction. During training, the amount of visual exposure was equated such that participants received an equal number of learning trials for wading birds and owls. Pre- and posttraining performance was measured in a same/different discrimination task in which participants judged whether pairs of bird stimuli belonged to the same or different species. Participants trained in species-level discrimination demonstrated greater transfer to novel exemplars and novel species categories than participants trained in family-level discrimination. These findings suggest that perceptual categorization, not perceptual exposure per se, is important for the development and generalization of visual expertise.

title: The Effect of Categorisation on Sensitivity to Second-Order Relations in Novel Objects
abstract: Adults appear to be more sensitive to configural information, including second-order relations (the spacing of features), in faces than in other objects. Superior processing of second-order relations in faces may arise from our experience of identifying faces at the individual level of categorisation (eg Bob versus John) but other objects at the basic level of categorisation (eg table versus chair; Gauthier and Tarr, 1997 Vision Research 37 1673–1682). We simulated this learning difference with novel stimuli (comprised of blobs) by having two groups view the same stimuli but learn to identify the objects only at the basic level (based on the number of constituent blobs) or at both the basic level and individual level (based on the spacing, or second-order relations, of the blobs) of categorisation. Results from two experiments showed that, after training, observers in the individual-level training group were more sensitive to the second-order relations in novel exemplars of the learned category than observers in the basic-level training group. This is the first demonstration of specific improvement in sensitivity to second-order relations after training with non-face stimuli. The findings are consistent with the hypothesis that adults are more sensitive to second-order relations in faces than in other objects, at least in part, because they have more experience identifying faces at the individual level of categorisation.

title: Training ‘greeble’ experts: a framework for studying expert object recognition processes
abstract: Twelve participants were trained to be experts at identifying a set of 'Greebles', novel objects that, like faces, all share a common spatial configuration. Tests comparing expert with novice performance revealed: (1) a surprising mix of generalizability and specificity in expert object recognition processes; and (2) that expertise is a multi-faceted phenomenon, neither adequately described by a single term nor adequately assessed by a single task. Greeble recognition by a simple neural-network model is also evaluated, and the model is found to account surprisingly well for both generalization and individuation using a single set of processes and representations.

title: A decisional component of holistic encoding.
abstract: It has been proposed (see, specifically, M. J. Farah, K. D. Wilson, M. Drain, & J. N. Tanaka, 1998) that human faces are used in cognition as undifferentiated wholes. General recognition theory (GRT; F. G. Ashby & J. T. Townsend, 1986) is used to represent hypotheses regarding the possible sources for the behavioral evidence supporting holistic representation. Specifically, it is suggested that holism can be understood in terms of violations of informational independence, informational separability, or decisional separability, as these constructs are defined in GRT. Stimuli were presented upright, inverted, and in an encoding task that emphasized the meaningful nature of the stimuli. Patterns of performance (recognition hit rates) were consistent with prior studies. However, there were only a handful of violations of informational separability. Instead, consistent violations of decisional separability suggested a decisional basis for holistic effects.

title: Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence for configural processing in fingerprint experts
abstract: Visual expertise in fingerprint examiners was addressed in one behavioral and one electrophysiological experiment. In an X-AB matching task with fingerprint fragments, experts demonstrated better overall performance, immunity to longer delays, and evidence of configural processing when fragments were presented in noise. Novices were affected by longer delays and showed no evidence of configural processing. In Experiment 2, upright and inverted faces and fingerprints were shown to experts and novices. The N170 EEG component was reliably delayed over the right parietal/temporal regions when faces were inverted, replicating an effect that in the literature has been interpreted as a signature of configural processing. The inverted fingerprints showed a similar delay of the N170 over the right parietal/temporal region, but only in experts, providing converging evidence for configural processing when experts view fingerprints. Together the results of both experiments point to the role configural processing in the development of visual expertise, possibly supported by idiosyncratic relational information among fingerprint features.

title: The role of category learning in the acquisition and retention of perceptual expertise: A behavioral and neurophysiological study
abstract: This study examined the neural mechanisms underlying perceptual categorization and expertise. Participants were either exposed to or learned to classify three categories of cars (sedans, SUVs, antiques) at either the basic or subordinate level. Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) as well as accuracy and reaction time were recorded before, immediately after, and 1-week after training. Behavioral results showed that only subordinate-level training led to better discrimination of trained cars, and this ability was retained a week after training. ERPs showed an equivalent increase in the N170 across all three training conditions whereas the N250 was only enhanced in response to subordinate-level training. The behavioral and electrophysiological results distinguish category learning at the subordinate level from category learning occurring at the basic level or from simple exposure. Together with data from previous investigations, the current results suggest that subordinate-level training, but not basic-level or exposure training, leads to expert-like improvements in categorization accuracy. These improvements are mirrored by changes in the N250 rather than the N170 component, and these effects persist at least a week after training, so are conceivably related to long-term learning processes supporting perceptual expertise.