Holistic Processing of Words Modulated by Reading Experience

Perceptual expertise has been studied intensively with faces and object categories involving detailed individuation. A common finding is that experience in fulfilling the task demand of fine, subordinate-level discrimination between highly similar instances is associated with the development of holistic processing. This study examines whether holistic processing is also engaged by expert word recognition, which is thought to involve coarser, basic-level processing that is more part-based. We adopted a paradigm widely used for faces – the composite task, and found clear evidence of holistic processing for English words. A second experiment further showed that holistic processing for words was sensitive to the amount of experience with the language concerned (native vs. second-language readers) and with the specific stimuli (words vs. pseudowords). The adoption of a paradigm from the face perception literature to the study of expert word perception is important for further comparison between perceptual expertise with words and face-like expertise

Beyond faces and modularity: the power of an expertise framework.

Studies of perceptual expertise typically ask whether the mechanisms underlying face recognition are domain specific or domain general. This debate has so dominated the literature that it has masked the more general usefulness of the expertise framework for studying the phenomenon of category specialization. Here we argue that the value of an expertise framework is not solely dependent on its relevance to face recognition. Beyond offering an alternative to domain-specific accounts of face specialization in terms of interactions between experience, task demands, and neural biases, expertise studies reveal principles of perceptual learning that apply to many different domains and forms of expertise. As such the expertise framework provides a unique window onto the functional plasticity of the mind and brain.</p

Accuracy and response times in Experiment 1.

<p>Error bars represent 95% confidence interval for the congruency factor.</p

The stimuli and trial sequence in Experiment 1.

<p>(A) Examples of pairs of Chinese characters (adapting and test) for the different conditions. Participants judged if the top parts of the two characters were the same. (B) The trial sequence.</p