Department of Philosophy, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of Utah, 380 South 1530 East, Room 502., Salt Lake City, UT, 841121, USA.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2021 Jun;28(3):870-878. doi: 10.3758/s13423-020-01858-w. Epub 2021 Jan 29.
Studies in the psychology of visual expertise have tended to focus on a limited set of expert domains, such as radiology and athletics. Conclusions drawn from these data indicate that experts use parafoveal vision to process images holistically. In this study, we examined a novel, as-of-yet-unstudied class of visual experts-architects-expecting similar results. However, the results indicate that architects, though visual experts, may not employ the holistic processing strategy observed in their previously studied counterparts. Participants (n = 48, 24 architects, 24 naïve) were asked to find targets in chest radiographs and perspective images. All images were presented in both gaze-contingent and normal viewing conditions. Consistent with a holistic processing model, we expected two results: (1) architects would display a greater difference in saccadic amplitude between the gaze-contingent and normal conditions, and (2) architects would spend less time per search than an undergraduate control group. We found that the architects were more accurate in the perspectival task, but they took more time and displayed a lower difference in saccadic amplitude than the controls. Our research indicates a disjunctive conclusion. Either architects are simply different kinds of visual experts than those previously studied, or we have generated a task that employs visual expertise without holistic processing. Our data suggest a healthy skepticism for across-the-board inferences collected from a single domain of expertise to the nature of visual expertise generally. More work is needed to determine whether holism is a feature of all visual expertise.
视觉专长心理学研究倾向于集中在有限的专家领域，如放射学和运动学。从这些数据中得出的结论表明，专家使用周边视觉整体地处理图像。在这项研究中，我们研究了一个新颖的、迄今为止尚未研究过的视觉专家群体——建筑师，期望得到类似的结果。然而，结果表明，尽管建筑师是视觉专家，但他们可能不会采用在之前研究的同行中观察到的整体处理策略。参与者（n = 48，24 名建筑师，24 名新手）被要求在胸部 X 光片和透视图像中找到目标。所有图像都在注视相关和正常观看条件下呈现。与整体处理模型一致，我们期望有两个结果：（1）建筑师在注视相关和正常条件下的眼跳幅度差异会更大，（2）建筑师的搜索时间会比本科生对照组少。我们发现，建筑师在透视任务中的准确性更高，但他们的眼跳幅度差异比对照组小，搜索时间也更长。我们的研究得出了一个矛盾的结论。要么建筑师是与之前研究的视觉专家不同类型的专家，要么我们生成了一种任务，这种任务不需要整体处理就能利用视觉专长。我们的数据表明，对于从单一专长领域收集到的视觉专长的整体推断，需要保持健康的怀疑态度。需要做更多的工作来确定整体是否是所有视觉专长的一个特征。
