Radiologists often need only a glance to grasp the essence of complex medical images. Here, we use paradigms and manipulations from perceptual learning and expertise fields to elicit mechanisms and limits of holistic processing in radiological expertise. In the first experiment, radiologists were significantly better at categorizing thorax X-rays…

With a brief half-second presentation, a medical expert can determine at above chance levels whether a medical scan she sees is abnormal based on a first impression arising from an initial global image process, termed "gist." The nature of gist processing is debated but this debate stems from results in medical experts who have years of…

Ratings of perceptual experience on a trial-by-trial basis are increasingly used in masked priming studies to assess prime awareness. It is argued that such subjective ratings more adequately capture the content of phenomenal consciousness compared to the standard objective psychophysical measures obtained in a session after the priming…

Identifying unfamiliar faces is surprisingly error-prone, even for experienced professionals who perform this task regularly. Previous attempts to train this ability have been largely unsuccessful, leading many to conclude that face identity processing is hard-wired and not amenable to further perceptual learning. Here, we take a novel expert…

The authors conducted 4 repetition priming experiments that manipulated prime duration and prime diagnosticity in a visual forced-choice perceptual identification task. The strength and direction of prime diagnosticity produced marked effects on identification accuracy, but those effects were resistant to subsequent changes of diagnosticity.…

The objective of the present study was to assess the development of luminance- and texture-defined static form perception in school-aged children. This was done using an adapted Landolt-C technique where C-optotypes were defined by either luminance or texture information, the latter necessitating extra-striate neural processing to be perceived.…

Most empirical research in L2 vowel perception focuses on the development of groups of learners. However, recent studies indicate that individual learners' developmental paths in L2 vowel perception may not be uniform (e.g., Escudero, 2001; Escudero and Boersma, 2004; Morrison, 2009). The aim of the present study is to add to this line of research…

Changes to a scene often go unnoticed if the objects of the change are unattended, making change detection an index of where attention is focused during scene perception. We measured change detection in school-age children and young adults by repeatedly alternating two versions of an image. To provide an age-fair assessment we used a bimanual…