Becoming a Ziggerin Expert—but Which Type?

نویسندگان

  • Alan C.-N. Wong
  • Thomas J. Palmeri
  • Isabel Gauthier
چکیده

Compared with other objects, faces are processed more holistically and with a larger reliance on configural information. Such hallmarks of face 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. Debates about whether face processing is ‘‘special’’ or not center around whether hallmarks of face processing can also be found for processing of other objects of expertise. Generally, processing of faces and processing of nonface objects differ in two important ways: First, faces are processed more holistically than other objects, in that it is more difficult to selectively attend to a single face part than to an object part (e.g., Cheung, Richler, Palmeri, & Gauthier, 2008; Farah, Wilson, Drain, & Tanaka, 1998; Gauthier & Tarr, 2002; Richler, Gauthier, Wenger, & Palmeri, 2008; Richler, Tanaka, Brown, & Gauthier, 2008). Second, configural information about spatial relationships between parts is more important for face perception (e.g., Diamond & Carey, 1986; Gauthier & Tarr, 2002; Tanaka & Sengco, 1997). Some researchers suggest that holistic and configural processing occur because they are innate properties of face perception or reflect early developmental constraints (McKone, Kanwisher, & Duchaine, 2007). Other researchers suggest that configural and holistic processing reflect perceptual styles and attentional strategies that can be learned through expertise in discriminating between individuals within a category; this is referred to as the expertise hypothesis (Gauthier & Tarr, 2002). For example, a strategy to attend to all parts of an object (holistic processing) may be learned when configural relations between features are especially diagnostic of identity (Diamond & Carey, 1986; Le Grand, Mondloch, Maurer, & Brent, 2004; Leder & Bruce, 1998, 2000; Mondloch, Le Grand, & Maurer, 2002; Searcy & Bartlett, 1996). As people develop expertise in nonface objects, they may exhibit holistic and configural processing of those objects as well. Participants trained with novel objects called Greebles have shown small but significant increases in both configural and holistic processing of Greebles (Gauthier & Tarr, 1997, 2002). Increases in holistic processing during the acquisition of Greeble expertise correlate with changes in the response of the fusiform face area to these objects (Gauthier & Tarr, 1997). Expertise with real-world objects also increases holistic processing: Cars in a normal configuration are processed more holistically than cars in an unfamiliar configuration, and this effect is directly related to the observer’s level of car expertise (Gauthier, Curran, Curby, & Collins, 2003). These claims have not gone without debate, particularly regarding the appropriate task design and analyses for measuring holistic and configural effects (e.g., compare Robbins &McKone, 2007, andMcKone & Robbins, 2007, with Cheung et al., 2008, Gauthier & Bukach, 2007, and Richler, Tanaka, et al., 2008). But putting methodological debates aside, researchers have yet to test one critical prediction of the expertise hypothesis: that expertise at individuating objects within a visually homogeneous category is Address correspondence to Alan C.-N. Wong, Department of Psychology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, N.T., Hong Kong, e-mail: [email protected]. PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE 1108 Volume 20—Number 9 Copyright r 2009 Association for Psychological Science specifically what causes participants to rely on configural information and to develop a more holistic processing strategy (Bukach, Gauthier, & Tarr, 2006; Gauthier & Tarr, 1997). According to the expertise hypothesis, significant experience with novel objects that does not involve individuation should not produce facelike effects in configural and holistic processing. An example concerns a domain in which all literate humans acquire expertise—the orthographic characters of their language. Expertise with Roman letters or Chinese characters requires basic-level categorization, but variability due to font or handwriting should be ignored (Gauthier, Wong, Hayward, & Cheung, 2006). In the case of faces and objects in other domains in which expertise requires individuation, categorization among experts is as quick at the subordinate identity level as at the more general basic level (Tanaka, 2001; Tanaka&Taylor, 1991); for most other objects, categorization among experts is quicker at the basic than at the subordinate level (i.e., a basic-level advantage; Rosch, Mervis, Gray, Johnson, & Boyes-Braem, 1976). The basic-level advantage for letters and characters is greater among experts than among novices (Wong & Gauthier, 2007). Configural and holistic processing have also been shown to diminish with letter and character expertise (Ge, Wang, McCleery, & Lee, 2006; Hsiao & Cottrell, 2009; van Leeuwen & Lachmann, 2004; but see Pelli & Tillman, 2007, and Simon, Petit, Bernard, & Rebai, 2007). To date, there is little direct evidence that individuation training per se reduces the basic-level advantage and increases configural and holistic processing strategies. In fact, some evidence suggests that even mere exposure to objects can produce effects once thought to be the hallmark of facelike expertise (as reflected by, for instance, the N170 event-related potential; Peissig, Singer, Kawasaki, & Sheinberg, 2007; Scott, Tanaka, Sheinberg, & Curran, 2006, 2008). Few studies have compared effects of different training regimens using the same objects. One found that generalization of rapid individuation skills to new exemplars of a trained category follows individuation training but not basic-level categorization training (Tanaka, Curran, & Sheinberg, 2005). Another (Nishimura & Maurer, 2008) showed that individuation, but not basic-level categorization, of blob patterns resulted in higher sensitivity to metric differences in spatial relations among blobs. However, these studies compared a difficult training regimen with a far-easier training procedure that produced little evidence of learning. Also, none of these previous studies examined whether different training regimens produced differential changes in holistic processing of the learned objects. In the study reported here, we compared the effects of individuation and categorization training with the same set of novel objects, holding object geometry and testing tasks constant. Instead of using the type of easy categorization-training procedures employed in previous studies, we aimed to train categorization experts by modeling some key components of experiencewith letters (Hsiao&Cottrell, 2009;Wong&Gauthier, 2007). Specifically, a large portion of categorization training was devoted to rapid, sequential basic-level categorization of objects within a spatial array. This task was designed to mirror some of people’s experience with letter recognition when reading texts. We examined holistic processing and its sensitivity to object configuration after training, using a composite task. Our primary hypothesis was that expertise at individuating objects within a visually homogeneous category is required for participants to develop a holistic processing strategy specific to the trained configuration of parts, and that experience categorizing at the basic level is insufficient.

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تاریخ انتشار 2009