| In a laboratory setting, expert visual processing can be developed in as little as ten hours, whereas real-world experts require ten years of study to become experts. One detector of acquired expertise is the inversion effect that tests for impaired recognition of familiar objects when they are presented upside down. The present research investigates the theory that categorization of highly similar exemplars is the mechanism that accounts for the development of expert object recognition and expert visual processing for all object classes. Participants were trained to expertly identify Caminalcules, a realistic, yet novel object class with a series of categorization tasks and a semantics component that helped bridge the gap between the lab experience and real-world learning. A significant inversion effect was found, showing that the participants acquired expert visual processing, thus lending support to the idea that one mechanism subserves the acquisition of visual expertise among disparate object classes. |
