Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Volume 8, Issue 8, 1 August 2004, Pages 378-386
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Computational approaches to the development of perceptual expertise

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2004.06.001Get rights and content

Abstract

Dog experts, ornithologists, radiologists and other specialists are noted for their remarkable abilities at categorizing, identifying and recognizing objects within their domain of expertise. A complete understanding of the development of perceptual expertise requires a combination of thorough empirical research and carefully articulated computational theories that formalize specific hypotheses about the acquisition of expertise. A comprehensive computational theory of the development of perceptual expertise remains elusive, but we can look to existing computational models from the object-recognition, perceptual-categorization, automaticity and related literatures for possible starting points. Arguably, hypotheses about the development of perceptual expertise should first be explored within the context of existing computational models of visual object understanding before considering the creation of highly modularized adaptations for particular domains of perceptual expertise.

Section snippets

The development of perceptual expertise

It goes without saying that experts know more than novices. They can verbalize more properties, describe more relationships, make more inferences, and so forth 13, 14, 15. That is what makes them experts after all. Our focus in this review is on how expertise is manifest in more perceptually oriented tasks.

Computational models of the development of perceptual expertise

We focus on models from the object recognition and perceptual categorization literatures, two fields of visual object understanding that grew from largely separate research traditions but have recently begun to converge empirically and theoretically [8]. As this is a selective review, we necessarily omit several important alternative theoretical approaches 38, 39, but our selection was aimed at presenting a coherent theoretical package. Figure 1 outlines the relationships between the various

Concluding remarks

Expertise could entail the creation of highly specialized, modular adaptations to an object domain. However, we argue here that it is important first to try to ground explanations within existing computational models that already account for important aspects of visual object understanding. After reviewing current models from the object-recognition and perceptual-categorization literatures, we identified several hypotheses for the development of perceptual expertise. Some of these hypothesized

Acknowledgements

The authors’ work is supported by NSF Grants BCS-0218507, BCS-9910756 and BCS-0091752, NIMH Grant R01 MH61370, NEI Grant R01 EY13441, NEI Grant P30 EY008126, and a grant from the James S. McDonnell Foundation. The authors wish to thank members of the Perceptual Expertise Network (funded by JSMF) for helpful discussions.

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