Does perceptual expertise have an emotional side?

As people become perceptual experts in a given domain, they begin to develop a “holistic” processing style, in which features and their relations are integrated into a perceptual unit rather than being processed independently. We are currently investigating whether a perceiver’s emotional state impacts the degree to which objects are processed holistically. If so, this may provide insights into whether the positive emotions typically associated with objects of expertise contribute to the shift from a feature-based strategy to a more holistic processing strategy.

Time is of the essence: Does expertise impact the time-course of perceptual processing?

Although it may seem instantaneous, perception unfolds over time – and visual expertise may affect this time-course. Recent electrophysiological evidence suggests that upright face processing experiences a temporal processing advantage relative to that of other object categories, and that this temporal advantage may result from our orientation-specific expertise with upright faces. How does this temporal advantage manifest itself at a behaviorally observable level? What are the time-course parameters that differentiate between processing of objects of expertise and processing of less familiar objects?

Why we never forget a face?

Results from our lab demonstrate that perceptual expertise influences visual short-term memory (VSTM) capacity, with a VSTM advantage for faces and other non-face objects of expertise over less familiar object categories (Curby & Gauthier, 2007; Curby, Glazek, & Gauthier, in press). Such results suggest that the manner in which experts encode information may be more efficient than the manner in which non-experts do, thereby leading to more objects being stored in VSTM. Ongoing studies in the lab are exploring the basis of this advantage.

What underlies holistic processing? The search for a mechanistic account of expert processing.

Although many studies of face- and other object-of-expertise processing provide compelling demonstrations of expertise-related holistic processing, little is known about the precise mechanisms that underlie this processing strategy. How do these mechanisms differ from those underlying the more part- or feature-based strategy typically adopted for objects of non-expertise? One of our lab’s aims is to provide insight into these mechanisms and how they may develop for the processing of objects of expertise.

The face recognition deficit in autism: Why does the normal perceptual expertise with faces fail to develop?

Children with autism have difficulty recognizing faces, a deficit that likely contributes to their debilitating social difficulties. Why do children with autism often fail to develop perceptual expertise for faces? Do face-processing differences between children with and without autism originate in early or late stages of visual information processing? We are currently exploring these questions together with colleagues at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.