Neural Correlates of Visual Perceptual Expertise: Evidence From Cognitive Neuroscience Using Functional Neuroimaging

Abstract

Functional neuroimaging is a useful approach to study the

Unboxing the Black Box of Visual Expertise in Medicine

“…Second, when measuring neural activity or blood flow, do we really do justice to the nature of expertise in its complexity? For these and other more pragmatical reasons (costs of conducting such research), most of the research presented in the article by Gegenfurtner, Kok, Van Geel, De Bruin, and Sorger (2017) is actually not related to medical expertise. Actually, only three of the presented studies investigated medical expertise as they involved real, medical tasks (Fiorio, Cesari, Bresciani, & Tinazzi, 2010;Melo et al, 2011;Ribas, Rocha, Siqueira Ortega, Freitas de Rocha, & Massad, 2013).…”

Methodologies for Studying Visual Expertise

“…At this point in time, the activation metaphor for visual expertise has rarely been used in medical diagnosis studies (Gegenfurtner et al, 2017b). However, the coming together of learning research and neuroscience is beginning to form an exciting new field (Ansari & Coch, 2006;De Jong, Van Gog, Jenks, Manlove, Van Hell, Jolles, et al, 2009).…”

“…Certainly, it is not a novel statement that behaviors, such as diagnosing a medical image, that appear similar on the surface may involve very different cognitive/perceptual mechanisms underlying this behavior. Neuroscience, in combination with the learning sciences, now provides a new avenue for tackling these issues, to further understand visual expertise (Bilalić, 2017;Gegenfurtner et al, 2017b).…”

“…Much medical research done in both traditions has been reviewed elsewhere (Boshuizen & Schmidt, 2008;Ericsson, 2004;Gegenfurtner, Kok, Van Geel, De Bruin, Jarodzka, Szulewski, & Van Merriënboer, 2017;Gegenfurtner, Siewiorek, Lehtinen, & Säljö, 2013;Patel, Arocha, & Zhang, 2005). Recently, alternative approaches have been formulated; these suggest that a good eye is indicated by neurophysiologic events in certain brain areas (Bilalić, 2017;Gegenfurtner, Kok, Van Geel, De Bruin, & Sorger, 2017b;Haller & Radue, 2005), and is accomplished through situated social discourse (Ivarsson, 2017;Johansson, Lindwall, & Rystedt, 2017;Koschmann, LeBaron, Goodwin, Zemel, & Dunnington, 2007). In short, the allegory of having a good eye in medicine is proposed, indicated, and elaborated by various measures contingent on diverse methodological arenas that all attempt to advance our understanding of what constitutes visual expertise.…”

“…Each article is devoted to one approach (or to a combination of approaches) and discusses its affordances and constraints for empirically analyzing visual expertise. These approaches are: cognitive-neurosciences (Gegenfurtner et al, 2017b), receiver operating characteristics analysis (Krupsinki, 2017), eye tracking (Fox & Faulkner-Jones, 2017), pupillometry (Szulewski, Kelton, & Howes, 2017), the flash-preview moving window paradigm (Litchfield & Donovan, 2017), the combination of eye tracking data and verbal report data (Helle, 2017), the use of interviews and verbal protocols (Van de Wiel, 2017), ethnomethodology (Ivarsson, 2017), and the expert performance approach (Williams, Fawyer, & Hodges, 2017). The special issue closes with two commentaries (Boucheix, 2017;Jarodzka & Boshuizen, 2017).…”