Perceptual Categorization in Real-World Expertise

具有感知能力的人通常在光线不足和伪装的情况下，能够迅速识别出特定的物体。法医专家可以准确地将样本与可能很小、扭曲或污迹的潜在指纹相匹配。放射科专家可以迅速将医学图像分类为正常或癌变。这个项目在两个现实世界的感知领域中考察了从新手到专家的连续统的感知、分类和识别。总体目标是了解基本的感知和认知机制是如何被经验和专业知识调整和修改的。该项目产生的模型将使我们能够了解现实世界感性专业知识的发展，并验证专家表现的理论基础措施。为什么要研究感性经验？就像天赋异禀的运动员不断挑战自己身体的极限，或者获奖的数学家不断挑战自己思维的极限一样，感知专家不断挑战自己感知系统的极限。也许有了更好的感知专家标记和对人们如何成为感知专家的更好理解，我们可以更有效地识别潜在的感知专家，更有效地培训新的感知专家，更彻底地评估现有的感知专家。研究感知专业知识还可以帮助我们了解我们所有人都拥有的各种日常专业知识，例如识别面孔或阅读单词。这可以产生对教育和劳动力培训的新见解，以及对脑损伤或疾病的破坏如何导致感知和学习缺陷的新见解，并可能为未来在评估、干预或治疗方面的突破提供信息。

People with perceptual expertise are skilled at making rapid identifications of specialized objects at a glance, often in poor light and camouflage. Forensic experts can accurately match exemplars to latent fingerprints that may be small, distorted, or smudged. Expert radiologists can quickly categorize medical images as normal or cancerous. This project examines perception, categorization, and identification along the continuum from novice to expert performance in two real-world perceptual domains. The overall aim is to understand how fundamental perceptual and cognitive mechanisms are tuned and modified by experience and expertise. The models arising from this project will enable us to understand the development of real-world perceptual expertise and to validate theoretically-grounded measures of expert performance. Why study perceptual expertise? Just as gifted athletes push the limits of their bodies, or prize-winning mathematicians push the limits of their minds, perceptual experts push the limits of their perceptual systems. Perhaps with better markers of perceptual expertise and a better understanding of how people become perceptual experts, we could identify potential perceptual experts more effectively, train new perceptual experts more efficiently, and evaluate existing perceptual experts more thoroughly. Studying perceptual expertise can also help inform our understanding of the kinds of everyday expertise that we all have, such as recognizing faces or reading words. This can yield new insights into education and workforce training along with new insights into how the ravages of brain damage or disease might lead to perceptual and learning deficits and potentially inform future breakthroughs in evaluation, intervention, or treatment.