Expertise Moderates Incidentally Learned Associations Between Words and Images.

Heather Bruett,Xiaoping Fang,Marc N Coutanche,Deepan C Kamaraj,Elizabeth Haley

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02085

Abstract

Individuals with expertise in a domain of knowledge demonstrate superior learning for information in their area of expertise, relative to non-experts. In this study, we investigated whether expertise benefits extend to learning associations between words and images that are encountered incidentally. Sport-knowledge-experts and non-sports-experts encountered previously unknown faces through a basic perceptual task. The faces were incidentally presented as candidates for a position in a sports team (a focus of knowledge for only the sports-experts) or for a job in a business (a focus of knowledge for both the sports-experts and non-sports-experts). Participants later received a series of surprise memory tests that tested: ability to recognize each face as being old, the amount of information recalled about each face, and ability to select a correct face from equally familiar alternatives. Relative to non-sports-experts, participants with superior sports expertise were able to better recall the information associated with each face and could better select associated faces from similarly familiar options for the hypothetical prospective athletes. Hypothetical job candidates were recalled and selected at similar levels of performance in both groups. The groups were similarly familiar with the images (in a yes/no recognition memory test) when the faces were prospective athletes or job candidates. These findings suggest a specific effect of expertise on associative memory between words and images, but not for individual items, supporting a dissociation in how expertise modulates the human memory system for word–image pairings.

Highlights

Experts remember content related to their domain of expertise at a greater level than nonexperts, giving them a distinct learning advantage (Sala and Gobet, 2017)
We report an expertise advantage for incidentally learned word–image associations for words within a person’s domain of expertise, and unknown arbitrary images
While previous studies have shown an expertise advantage in learning domain-relevant information (Chase and Simon, 1973; Deakin and Allard, 1991; Long and Prat, 2002), our findings indicate that an expertise advantage can be expanded to include images that are not a focus of the expertise

Summary

Introduction

Experts remember content related to their domain of expertise at a greater level than nonexperts, giving them a distinct learning advantage (Sala and Gobet, 2017). For example, can recreate a previously seen chessboard more accurately than chess novices (Chase and Simon, 1973). This expertise advantage can be attributed to experts’ more extensive and organized prior knowledge (Sala and Gobet, 2017). Connections within neural networks of the neocortex and subcortical areas likely allow rapid learning of new information that is related to existing. Experts, whose neural networks hold extensive representations of expertise-related knowledge, are thereby able to rapidly learn new information in their domain of expertise. The aim of this study is to investigate the impact of expertise on the incidental encoding of associations between expertise-related words and unrelated images

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