Many Faces of Expertise: Fusiform Face Area in Chess Experts and Novices

Abstract

The fusiform face area (FFA) is involved in face perception to such an extent that some claim it is a brain module for faces exclusively. The other possibility is that FFA is modulated by experience in individuation in any visual domain, not only faces. Here we test this latter FFA expertise hypothesis using the game of chess as a domain of investigation. We exploited the characteristic of chess, which features multiple objects forming meaningful spatial relations. In three experiments, we show that FFA activity is related to stimulus properties and not to chess skill directly. In all chess and non-chess tasks, experts' FFA was more activated than that of novices' only when they dealt with naturalistic full-board chess positions. When common spatial relationships formed by chess objects in chess positions were randomly disturbed, FFA was again differentially active only in experts, regardless of the actual task. Our experiments show that FFA contributes to the holistic processing of domain-specific multipart stimuli in chess experts. This suggests that FFA may not only mediate human expertise in face recognition but, supporting the expertise hypothesis, may mediate the automatic holistic processing of any highly familiar multipart visual input.

Sparse distributed memory: understanding the speed and robustness of expert memory

“…Current results hold strong evidence that FFA activation is correlated with domain-specific expertise in naturalistic settings (Bilalić et al, 2011b). Additionally, it is shown that expertise in object-recognition tasks modulates activation in different areas of the brain (Bilalić et al, 2011a), including homologous right-left hemispheric activation in both object and pattern recognition expertise (Bilalić et al, 2010, 2012).…”

Knowing when not to swing: EEG evidence that enhanced perception–action coupling underlies baseball batter expertise

“…Over time, as with car recognition (McGugin et al, 2012) or chess expertise (Bilalić et al, 2011), the expert baseball players’ fusiform gyri may have become selective to differentiate baseball pitch-like objects. Thus, when performing a task that was meant to be a simulation of baseball pitches, the experts’ fusiform areas were more activated than the novices.…”

“…Bar hypothesizes that the associations driven in part by the orbitofrontal cortex combine with the visual expertise driven in part by the FFA to produce superior prediction capabilities in visual experts. The fusiform gyrus (FG), an area that includes the FFA, is best know for its face selectivity (Grill-Spector et al, 2004; Kanwisher et al, 1997; Liu et al, 2010), though more recently, studies have shown that the FFA responds to dynamic biological motion (Peelen et al, 2006; Sokolov et al, 2012) and non-face objects, if those objects are associated with expertise (Bilalić et al, 2011; Bilalic et al, 2012; Gauthier et al, 1999; McGugin et al, 2012; Rossion et al, 2004; Tong et al, 2008; Xu, 2005) suggesting a role for FFA, and potentially OFC, in perception-action coupling for expertise-driven rapid visual decisions.…”

Measuring nonvisual knowledge about object categories: The Semantic Vanderbilt Expertise Test

“…It should be easier to add obscure nomenclature to increase the difficulty of tests for experts, but there is always a concern that below a certain minimal level of expertise, poor performers simply get lumped into an undifferentiated “novice” group. Research in some domains of expertise (e.g., chess) simply do not have reliable measures below a certain skill level (Bilalic, Langner, Erb, & Grodd, 2010; Bilalic, Langner, Ulrich, & Grodd, 2011). In keeping with these goals, we mainly focused on testing subjects from the “normal” population (an undergraduate subject pool and a sample of workers from Amazon Mechanical Turk with US IP addresses), but in Experiment 2 we also test an expert population for one category.…”