Individual Differences in Holistic Processing

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Recognizing and discriminating among faces and objects is a critical human ability, particularly for jobs that require highly specialized visual skills such as in forensics, medical imaging, and homeland security. Recent research suggests that there is vast individual variability among people in their perceptual abilities, including the ability to recognize faces and non-face objects. However, people are poor at predicting their perceptual abilities relative to others, making it difficult to capitalize on this variability. This project applies a psychometric approach to the study of individual differences in perceptual abilities. From a theoretical perspective, studying these individual differences provides a new avenue for understanding mechanisms underlying visual perception. Practically speaking, these tools can identify individuals with the greatest aptitude for work that demands specific visual skills, such as baggage screening, satellite imagery analysis, and radiology. Creating and validating reliable psychometric tools in high-level vision can be useful to basic and applied science, education, and industry. Some jobs require hundreds of perceptual decisions each day, and some organizations rely on combining perceptual decisions from many individuals. The ability to predict even a small amount of variance between people could culminate in improved accuracy, increased efficiency, and decreased cost.This project focuses on holistic processing, a visual strategy associated with face recognition, but also with other examples of expert perception. This project will exend recent efforts to measure individual differences in holistic processing by creating and testing measures that will enable the researchers to address questions about individual differences in holistic processing in a reliable manner. The project will then explore the construct validity of holistic processing using these measures to address several questions: Is holistic face processing related to domain-general abilities? How is holistic processing related to face recognition ability? How are these relationships mediated by learning that may occur within a test? Finally, experiments will focus on the interplay between domain-general and domain-specific factors during the acquisition of holistic processing, asking whether holistic processing correlates across domains, and as a function of training experiences. This represents a bridge between experimental work on the mechanisms of acquisition of holistic processing and an individual differences approach. These studies will help determine whether there is one or several possible causes of holistic processing effects, and how to choose a training method on the basis of basic cognitive measures to achieve a given training outcome. Thus, this project will combine correlational and experimental methods to establish the validity of holistic processing and elucidate its role in the network of relationships within which it operates.