Are All Types of Expertise Created Equal? Car Experts Use Different Spatial Frequency Scales for Subordinate Categorization of Cars and Faces

Assaf Harel,Shlomo Bentin

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0067024

Abstract

A much-debated question in object recognition is whether expertise for faces and expertise for non-face objects utilize common perceptual information. We investigated this issue by assessing the diagnostic information required for different types of expertise. Specifically, we asked whether face categorization and expert car categorization at the subordinate level relies on the same spatial frequency (SF) scales. Fifteen car experts and fifteen novices performed a category verification task with spatially filtered images of faces, cars, and airplanes. Images were categorized based on their basic (e.g. “car”) and subordinate level (e.g. “Japanese car”) identity. The effect of expertise was not evident when objects were categorized at the basic level. However, when the car experts categorized faces and cars at the subordinate level, the two types of expertise required different kinds of SF information. Subordinate categorization of faces relied on low SFs more than on high SFs, whereas subordinate expert car categorization relied on high SFs more than on low SFs. These findings suggest that expertise in the recognition of objects and faces do not utilize the same type of information. Rather, different types of expertise require different types of diagnostic visual information.

Highlights

An enduring question in object recognition is what defines expert perceptual processes and how different they are from regular, everyday object recognition
The crucial question outlining the current study is whether car experts utilize spatial frequency (SF) information in a way that resembles more face categorization or object categorization
As expertise in the recognition of both faces and objects is primarily expressed at the subordinate level of categorization, our following analyses focus on subordinate level categorization

Summary

Introduction

An enduring question in object recognition is what defines expert perceptual processes and how different they are from regular, everyday object recognition. Others considered face perception as an extreme manifestation of perceptual expertise [5,6], which may be generalized to objects other than faces, to objects that form a visually homogenous category with a prototypical part configuration [7,8]. The latter view challenges face specificity suggesting that processing characteristics usually attributed to faces are a general expression of expert visual processing rather than a peculiarity of face recognition. The present study addresses this contended issue by investigating the type of visual information utilized by experts while recognizing objects of expertise, and whether such information is different from expert processing of faces, on the one hand, and from processing objects outside the domain of expertise, on the other hand

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