Perceptual expertise Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

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Eye tracking and behavioral methods were used to assess the effects of fatigue on performance in latent print examiners. Eye gaze was measured both before and after a fatiguing exercise involving fine-grained examination decisions. The... more

Eye tracking and behavioral methods were used to assess the effects of fatigue on performance in latent print examiners. Eye gaze was measured both before and after a fatiguing exercise involving fine-grained examination decisions. The eye tracking tasks used similar images, often laterally reversed versions of
previously viewed prints, which holds image detail constant while minimizing prior recognition. These methods, as well as a within-subject design with fine grained analyses of the eye gaze data, allow fairly strong conclusions despite a relatively small subject population. Consistent with the effects of fatigue on
practitioners in other fields such as radiology, behavioral performance declined with fatigue, and the eye gaze statistics suggested a smaller working memory capacity. Participants also terminated the search/examination process sooner when fatigued. However, fatigue did not produce changes in inter-examiner consistency as measured by the Earth Mover Metric. Implications for practice are discussed.

Can early individual differences in performance predict later expertise in the applied domain of fingerprint identification? We tracked 24 new trainees over the course of a year as they accumulated experience working in a fingerprint... more

Can early individual differences in performance predict later expertise in the applied domain of fingerprint identification? We tracked 24 new trainees over the course of a year as they accumulated experience working in a fingerprint unit. We tested their performance every three months on four measures of fingerprint expertise. Trainees significantly improved on all four measures, with the majority of learning occurring within the first three months. When we indexed trainees’ performance, by averaging across their percent correct scores on all four measures of expertise, we found early indexed performance was significantly and positively related to their indexed performance three, six, nine, and 12 months later. These findings provide a rich example of how perceptual expertise can emerge within an applied domain, and evidence that early individual differences on a composite measure of performance can be diagnostic of later expertise.

Access to visual awareness for human faces is strongly influenced by spatial orientation: Under continuous flash suppression (CFS), upright faces break into awareness more quickly than inverted faces. This effect of inversion for faces is... more

Access to visual awareness for human faces is strongly influenced by spatial orientation: Under continuous flash suppression (CFS), upright faces break into awareness more quickly than inverted faces. This effect of inversion for faces is larger than for a wide range of other animate and inanimate objects. Here we asked whether this apparently specific sensitivity to upright faces reflects face-specific detection mechanisms or whether it reflects perceptual expertise more generally. We tested car experts who varied in their degree of car and face expertise and measured the time upright and inverted faces, cars, and chairs needed to overcome CFS and break into awareness. Results showed that greater car expertise was correlated with larger car inversion effects under CFS. A similar relation between better discrimination performance and larger CFS inversion effects was found for faces. CFS inversion effects are thus modulated by perceptual expertise for both faces and cars. These results demonstrate that inversion effects in conscious access are not unique to faces but similarly exist for other objects of expertise. More generally, we interpret these findings as suggesting that access to awareness and exemplar-level discrimination rely on partially shared perceptual mechanisms.

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