Abstract
As car expertise increases, so does interference between the visual processing of faces and that of cars; this suggests performance trade-offs across domains of real-world expertise. Such interference between expert domains has been previously revealed in a relatively complex design, interleaving 2-back part-judgment task with faces and cars (Gauthier et al., 2003). However, the basis of this interference is unclear. Experiment 1A replicated the finding of interference between faces and cars, as a function of car expertise. Experiments 1B and 2 investigated the mechanisms underlying this effect by (1) providing baseline measures of performance and (2) assessing the specificity of this interference effect. Our findings support the presence of expertise-dependent interference between face and non-face domains of expertise. However, surprisingly, it is in the condition where faces are processed among cars with a disrupted configuration where expertise has a greater influence on faces. This finding highlights how expertise-related processing changes also occur for transformed objects of expertise and that such changes can also drive interference across domains of expertise.
Highlights
Face perception is often described as a domain of perceptual expertise
Comparing with Experiment 1, the estimate of facilitation from faces among eggs was both indistinguishable from that obtained from car novices matching faces among transformed cars, t(26) = 1.27, p = 0.22, d = 0.50, and significantly less than that obtained from car experts matching faces among cars with inverted tops, t(26) = 2.39, p = 0.02, d = 0.94
Having found that the interaction depended on the processing of faces among transformed cars, we investigated these effects further by using a dual-task with isolated parts to partition congruency effects into interference from incongruent parts and facilitation from congruent parts
Summary
Face perception is often described as a domain of perceptual expertise. Our skill with faces manifests itself across many different tasks and is often impressive for familiar faces. Normal adults can recognize familiar faces with accuracy >90% despite not having seen some of these faces for over 35 years (Bahrick et al, 1975). Most people are as fast to categorize an image as a “face” as they are to categorize it at an individual level (“Bill Clinton’s face”; Tanaka, 2001). Observers are much slower to categorize an image of a bird at a similar subordinate level—for example, categorizing an animal as a “cardinal” is slower than categorizing it at the basic level, “bird” (Tanaka and Taylor, 1991). Observers can retain more faces in visual short-term memory than they can other objects (Curby and Gauthier, 2007; Curby et al, 2009). Face processing is more sensitive to subtle changes in the spatial-relations between features than object processing (Haig, 1984; Hosie et al, 1988; Kemp et al, 1990; Bruce et al, 1991)
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