Abstract
Humans are more proficient at processing visual display of body posture when the body is in upright orientation, compared to when inverted (inversion effect). Here we investigated whether extensive exposure or expertise on body posture recognition would affect the efficiency with which body-posture is processed. Using whole-body and piecemeal-body postures as stimuli, we performed two experiments to investigate whether body-posture recognition differed between two groups of participants: undergraduates majoring in physical education (PE) and those in other subjects (non-PE), respectively. These two groups differed significantly in the frequency and intensity of exercise per day and/or accumulated exercise time. In our experiments, following initial presentation of an image of a body posture, participants were shown the same or a different stimulus and were asked to report whether or not they had been previously shown the same image. The orientations of the body postures were also varied between trials. Our results showed that, in Experiment 1, for whole-body posture recognition, both the PE and non-PE groups showed a robust body-inversion effect in terms of both error rate and reaction time (RT), but the magnitude of the body-inversion effect in the RT measure was greater in the PE than the non-PE group. In Experiment 2, for piecemeal-body postures, both groups showed the inversion effect in terms of both error rate and RT measures and the PE group made fewer overall errors than the non-PE group. These cumulative results suggest that a superiority effect exists for PE participants compared with non-PE participants. Our results are generally consistent with the expertise hypothesis.
Highlights
Humans are exposed to various types of objects in their daily lives
Error Rate The error rate was analyzed using a 2 × 2 mixed analysis of variance (ANOVA)
The same pattern of results were found in the non-physical education (PE) group F(1,58) = 22.29, p < 0.01, which shows that upright body postures (M = 653 ms) were reacted to in a shorter time than inverted body postures (M = 707 ms)
Summary
Humans are exposed to various types of objects in their daily lives. When certain stimuli are repeatedly encountered, people obtain extensive visual experiences of recognizing such stimuli and develop more efficient approaches in processing and representing them in their brains. The “inverted paradigm” consists of presentation of upright or inverted images of faces or other objects (e.g., airplanes, houses, etc.). Following initial presentation of a stimulus image, participants were subsequently shown the same or a different stimulus and were asked to report whether or not they had been previously shown that same image. Findings from this paradigm illustrate that the inversion of faces disproportionately impairs recognition in comparison to the inversion of non-face objects such as airplanes. A considerable number of behavioral and neurophysiological studies have supported the hypothesis that humans have specialized cognitive and neural mechanisms for processing faces, known as the “face-domain-specific hypothesis.”
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