Interaction between Face and Expert Object Recognition: a Study on Bird Expertise

• Main Authors: Chiu-YuehChen, 陳秋月
• Other Authors: Chun-Chia Kung
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2013
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/me2wyy

碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 心理學系認知科學碩士班 === 101 === Face recognition is the hallmark of human ultimate performance： efficient, parallel, highly accurate, and with seemingly unlimited capacity. To explain this, some have suggested that, through the evolution that endows into our genes (shown in newborn infants), faces enjoy privileged processing mechanisms and resources. On the other hand, proponents of the perceptual expertise hypothesis emphasize the importance of experience：by showing not only some acclaimed face-only effects in domain experts, but also interactions between faces and objects of expertise under tasks (i.e., 2-back face-car interference task). To broaden such interaction beyond car experts and also to explore other aspects of this interaction, the current study recruited 19 bird experts and 19 age-matched novices to do (a) face configuration task of various difficulty; (b) two (visual and auditory) bird expertise measurements, (c) composite face and bird task, and (d) the 2-back face-bird interference task. The results showed that (a) though there was no systematic differences between bird experts’ and novices’ performance, birders as a group correlated in the harder distance discrimination (e.g., between eyes or between nose and lip) tasks, suggesting that birding experience seems to increase their discriminability in face gestalts; (b) bird expertise can, depending on their birding locales, be divided into two related, but separate, visual (shorebirds) and auditory (passerines) expertise; (c) there is no bird or face congruency effects in the standard composite task, consistent with some early study’s results. This may reflect the ceiling effect, or that subjects can flexibly change their attended halves (upper or lower); (d) in accordance and extending the previous 2-back alternative task’s results, we also found that the higher the bird expertise, the larger the face interference in our 2-back face-bird task. Furthermore, the higher the face composite effect (meaning the flexible looking of face parts) in study c, the lower the bird interference in the 2-back task on birders. Lastly, both negative (competing common resources) and positive (higher correlation of internal feature sensitivity, and lower bird interference with higher face composite effect) aspects of the face-bird interactions coexist independently, deepening the claim that faces and expert object categories share highly overlapping processing resources.