Current Research

Expertise

Expertise research in the Beyond Categories lab uses several tasks to study the limits of transfer in real-world bird experts from three different geographical regions to investigate the contributions of experience to visual discrimination, perceptual similarity, categorization, and holistic processing. We expect these skills to show limited transfer across regions for experts, with evidence for a subordinate level shift in category structure (that is, expertise should have a more substantial subordinate level category structure). Expertise should also fundamentally change the similarity relationships of exemplars to one-another within categories. These studies will provide clues indicating how experience changes the representations of categories in the brain.

Wong, A. C. N., Bukach, C. M., Hsiao, J., *Greenspon, E., *Ahern, E., *Duan, Y., & Liu, K., F. H. (2012). Holistic processing is a hallmark of perceptual expertise for non-face expertise including Chinese characters. Journal of Vision, 12, 1-15 doi:10.1167/12.13.7.

Bukach, C. M., Vickery, T., *Kinka, D. & Gauthier, I. (2012). Training experts: Individuation without naming is worth it. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 38, 14-17. doi: 10.1037/a0025610

Gauthier, I., & Bukach, C. M. (2007). Should we reject the expertise hypothesis? Cognition, 103, 322-330.

Bukach, C. M., Gauthier, I., & Tarr, M. J. (2006). Beyond faces and modularity: The power of an expertise framework. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10, 159-166.

Bukach, C. M., Bub, D. N., Gauthier, I. & Tarr, M. J. (2006). Perceptual expertise effects are NOT all or none: Evidence for a reduced spatial window of perceptual expertise in a case of prosopagnosia. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 18, 48-63.

*Denotes student co-authored publications

See the main RESEARCH page for a complete list of publications.