This book surveys the study of perceptual expertise in visual object recognition, introducing a variety of questions, research findings, and extant issues that have emerged from recent studies of face, object, and letter recognition. The book also discusses a novel collaborative model, codified as the “Perceptual Expertise Network.” The central idea of this group effort is an emphasis on domain-general principles of high-level visual learning that can account for how different object categories are processed and come to be associated with spatially localized activity in the primate brain. The ... More

This book surveys the study of perceptual expertise in visual object recognition, introducing a variety of questions, research findings, and extant issues that have emerged from recent studies of face, object, and letter recognition. The book also discusses a novel collaborative model, codified as the “Perceptual Expertise Network.” The central idea of this group effort is an emphasis on domain-general principles of high-level visual learning that can account for how different object categories are processed and come to be associated with spatially localized activity in the primate brain. The approach brings together different traditions and techniques critical to cognitive neuroscience, such as psychophysics, human brain imaging, monkey physiology, developmental work, neuropsychological studies, and computational modeling. In 12 chapters, members of the Perceptual Expertise Network and their collaborators review how face perception motivated the study of perceptual expertise with objects, how face expertise develops in children, how different kinds of experience result in different degrees of expertise, and how perceptual expertise can break down in individuals with autism or different forms of deficits in perception. They describe advances and challenges in developing models to account for expertise, including the need to account for competition between different domains of expertise and to specify the functional locus of effects of expertise. They introduce more recent directions in the study of expertise, including research on expertise with letters and research investigating the interactions between perception and conception. Finally, they discuss the difficulties in relating high-level perceptual impairments and brain-based evidence to normal performance.