Cho Felix Tze-Hei, Tan Cheng Yong, Wong Yetta Kwailing
Department of Educational Psychology, Faculty of Education, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong.
Faculty of Education, University of Hong Kong, Pok Fu Lam, Hong Kong.
Psychophysiology. 2023 May;60(5):e14236. doi: 10.1111/psyp.14236. Epub 2023 Jan 18.
Line junctions are well-known to be important for real-world object recognition, and sensitivity to line junctions is enhanced with perceptual experience with an object category. However, it remains unclear whether these very simple visual features are involved in expert object representations at the neural level, and if yes, at what level(s) they are involved. In this EEG study, 31 music reading experts and 31 novices performed a one-back task with intact musical notation, musical notation with line junctions removed and pseudo-letters. We observed more separable neural representations of musical notation from pseudo-letter for experts than for novices when line junctions were present and during 180-280 ms after stimulus onset. Also, the presence of line junctions was better decoded in experts than in novices during 320-580 ms, and the decoding accuracy in this time window predicted the behavioral recognition advantage of musical notation when line junctions were present. These suggest that, with perceptual expertise, line junctions are more involved in category selective representation of objects, and are more explicitly represented in later stages of processing to support expert recognition performance.
众所周知，线条交叉点对于现实世界中的物体识别很重要，并且对线条交叉点的敏感度会随着对某一物体类别的感知经验而增强。然而，目前尚不清楚这些非常简单的视觉特征在神经层面是否参与专家级别的物体表征，如果参与，它们在哪些层面参与。在这项脑电图研究中，31位音乐阅读专家和31位新手对完整乐谱、去除线条交叉点的乐谱以及伪字母进行了一项“1-back任务”。我们观察到，当存在线条交叉点时以及在刺激开始后的180-280毫秒期间，专家比新手能从伪字母中更清晰地分离出乐谱的神经表征。此外，在320-580毫秒期间，专家比新手能更好地解码线条交叉点的存在，并且这个时间窗口内的解码准确率预测了存在线条交叉点时乐谱在行为识别上的优势。这些结果表明，随着感知专业知识的积累，线条交叉点更多地参与物体的类别选择性表征，并且在处理的后期阶段更明确地被表征以支持专家级别的识别表现。
