Expertise is a cognitive achievement that clearly involves experience and learning, and often requires explicit, time-consuming training specific to the relevant domain. It is also intuitive that this kind of achievement is, in a rich sense, genuinely perceptual. Many experts—be they radiologists, bird watchers, or fingerprint examiners—are better perceivers in the domain(s) of their expertise. The goal of this paper is to motivate three related claims, by substantial appeal to recent empirical research on perceptual expertise: (...) Perceptual expertise is genuinely perceptual and genuinely cognitive, and this phenomenon reveals how we can become epistemically better perceivers. These claims are defended against sceptical opponents that deny significant top-down or cognitive effects on perception, and opponents who maintain that any such effects on perception are epistemically pernicious. (shrink)

Perceptual malleability and diversity can stem from perceptual learning, expertise, genetics, disease, or accident. Perceptual malleability and diversity force us to reject the claim that perceptual capacities, perceptual experience, and perceptual content are universal across subjects and times. And it casts doubt on the presumption of a universal human perceptual nature. However, it does not directly challenge perceptual objectivity, understood as the claim that one can perceive a world of things and (...) features that are independent from oneself and one's experiences and that could be perceived by other subjects. (shrink)

Dustin Stokes’s book contributes to one of the continuing debates in empirically informed philosophy of mind and cognitive sciences which concerns the relation between thought and perception. The book sheds new light on such questions as: whether vision is modular, informationally encapsulated, and thus cognitively impenetrable or rather the opposite – whether it is malleable and sensitive to further improvements by cognitive states. Stokes supports the latter by referring to empirical evidence on perceptual expertise. Proponents of the modular (...) and malleable architectures of the mind offer different explanations of the phenomena involved in perceptual expertise, viz. object identification and categorization. Interestingly, both views assume some kind of automaticity of the recognitional capacities for identifying and categorizing objects. In this article, I examine the influence of perceptual expertise on object recognition and how the seeming automaticity of object recognition may be approached from the modularist and antimodularist (malleabilist) perspectives. (shrink)

Perceptual expertise refers to learning that is specific to a domain, that transfers to new items within the trained domain, and that leads to automatic processing in the sense that expertise effects can be measured across a variety of tasks. It can be argued that most of us possess some degree of perceptual expertise in a least one, if not several domains, thereby giving the study of perceptual expertise broad application. Some object categories (...) may in fact be objects of perceptual expertise to the majority of people: Faces appear to be one such example. Thus, the use of face stimuli, or the comparison of face and object perception, can be a powerful way to ask whether a given process is influenced by perceptual expertise. Here, we emphasize one characteristic way that face processing appears to differ from nonface processing: that is, the degree to which they recruit a “holistic” rather than a “featural” perceptual strategy. This review brings evidence that expertise influences perceptual processing together with recent findings that the capacity of visual short-term memory is greater in perceptual experts and explores the relationship between the two. (shrink)

This article reviews how behavioral methods, event-related potentials, and functional magnetic resonance imaging are used to understand the acquisition of perceptual expertise in both adult and developmental populations. The purpose of this study is to provide an overview of the research focused on understanding the role and nature of experience in both the acquisition of perceptual expertise and the development of expert face processing. Behavioral tasks designed to assess perceptual expertise in adults include: (...) class='Hi'>perceptual discrimination and matching tasks and the categorization and recognition memory tasks. Training studies are used to mimic the natural acquisition of face and non-face perceptual expertise. Using these various methods and techniques, studies of perceptual expertise prove useful to the understanding of specialization of perceptual skills and categorization abilities and expands our understanding of the function and plasticity of the visual system. (shrink)

If we think of perceptual expertise, we might think ofa neurologist interpreting a CAT scan or an astronomerlooking at a star. But perceptual expertise is notlimited to ‘experts’. Perceptual expertise is atthe heart of our everyday competence in the world. Wenavigate around obstacles, we take turns inconversations, we make left-turns in face of on-comingtraffic. Each of us is a perceptual expert (thoughonly in certain domains). If we misunderstandperceptual expertise, we risk misunderstanding ourepistemic (...) relationship to the world. I argue that thestandard arguments for the received view of perceptualexpertise are problematic at best. Of course, theissue of whether the received view is actually correctis an empirical issue. But the decision to adopt thereceived view, I argue, was not a scientific decision,but was made by inheriting a philosophical tradition– which many philosophers today would question. (shrink)

Expertise in Chinese character recognition is marked by reduced holistic processing, which depends mainly on writing rather than reading experience. Here we show that, while simplified and traditional Chinese readers demonstrated a similar level of HP when processing characters shared between the simplified and traditional scripts, simplified Chinese readers were less holistic than traditional Chinese readers in perceiving simplified characters; this effect depended mainly on their writing rather than reading performance. However, the two groups did not differ in HP (...) of traditional characters, regardless of their difference in reading and writing performances. Our image analysis showed high visual similarity between the two character types, with a larger variance among simplified characters; this may allow simplified Chinese readers to interpolate and generalize their skills to traditional characters. Thus, transfer of perceptual expertise may be constrained by both the similarity in feature and the difference in exemplar variance between the categories. (shrink)

According to Hubert Dreyfus’s famous claim that expertise is fundamentally “mindless,” experts in any domain perform most effectively when their activity is automatic and unmediated by concepts or cognitive processes like attention and memory. While several scholars have recently challenged the plausibility of Dreyfus’s “mindless” account of expertise for explaining a wide range of expert activities, there has been little consideration of the one form of expertise which might be most amenable to Dreyfus’s account – namely, (...) class='Hi'>perceptual expertise. Indeed, Dreyfus’s account of expert coping is ultimately an account of perceptual expertise, in that an expert’s intuitive situational responses are thought to rely on a sophisticated repertoire of perceptual skills. In this paper, I examine the feedforward model of sensory processing that Dreyfus uses to illustrate the perceptual underpinnings of expert action, and consider its resonance with psychological research that characterizes perceptual expertise as being automatic, holistic, pre-attentive, and non-cognitive in nature. However, citing competing empirical research, I argue instead that Dreyfus’s model of perceptual expertise cannot adequately explain the integral roles of attention, memory, and conceptual knowledge in expert object recognition. I conclude that the Dreyfusian model of perceptual expertise fails – the perceptual repertoire of skills that grounds expert object recognition is not operative in isolation from the expert’s conceptual repertoire. (shrink)

Does feature evolution stop once we have acquired sufficient features to perform a recognition task? With extended practice, novices may develop a more sophisticated feature space that allows them to perform more accurately or quickly. Our work on perceptual expertise indicates that feature learning and reorganization can continue even after an initial set of features is available to represent a novel class of objects.

This chapter addresses the role of perceptual knowledge (knowledge by acquaintance) in the development of expertise in professional contexts. It seeks to answer the question of how, if at all, does heightened knowledge by acquaintance inform a high level of professional know‐how. Successful action requires the articulation of various epistemic capacities: to draw on relevant systematic knowledge, to understand the nature of the problem faced, to perceive the essentials in complex situations and to judge and then to act (...) appropriately. The aim is to bring together philosophical and empirical considerations to show how best to understand the ability to perceive the essentials in complex situations and how this ability bears on the ability to judge and to act appropriately in professional contexts. Perceptual concepts are acquired through social intercourse rather than through introspection and labelling. (shrink)

Learning in educational settings most often emphasizes declarative and procedural knowledge. Studies of expertise, however, point to other, equally important components of learning, especially improvements produced by experience in the extraction of information: Perceptual learning. Here we describe research that combines principles of perceptual learning with computer technology to address persistent difficulties in mathematics learning. We report three experiments in which we developed and tested perceptual learning modules to address issues of structure extraction and fluency in (...) relation to algebra and fractions. PLMs focus students’ learning on recognizing and discriminating, or mapping key structures across different representations or transformations. Results showed significant and persisting learning gains for students using PLMs. PLM technology offers promise for addressing neglected components of learning: Pattern recognition, structural intuition, and fluency. Using PLMs as a complement to other modes of instruction may allow students to overcome chronic problems in learning. (shrink)

We provide the first demonstration of an artificial neural network encoding the perceptual templates that form an important component of the high level strategic understanding developed by experts. Experts have a highly refined sense of knowing where to look, what information is important and what information to ignore. The conclusions these experts reach are of a higher quality and typically made in a shorter amount of time than those of non-experts. Understanding the manifestation of such abilities in terms of (...) both the psychology of expert performance and the underlying neural mechanisms constitutes one of the most challenging problems in the cognitive sciences. Using perceptual templates we show how the amount of contextual information can change significantly even within a given task, the relationship between local and non-local contexts and finally why there is very little correlation between measures of intelligence and level of expertise in many of the most complex tasks performed by humans. (shrink)

Perceptual performance, anticipating opponents' strategies, and judging chess positions especially in subliminal processing is related to expertise level and dependent on chunking processes. It becomes obvious that chess expertise is a multidimensional phenomenon related predominantly to experience. Under consideration of chess expertise categorization, we conducted two priming experiments expanding existing designs by gradually increasing the target and task complexity. The main aim was the evaluation of potential visuocognitive limitations. The results reveal experts' perceptual superiority manifested (...) by their faster reaction times in settings with increased stimulus and task complexity. Further, experts' priming effects seem to be affected by the target content and/ or priming duration. For short prime duration, experts show priming effects only for less complex prime-target content. Interestingly, for longer prime duration and more complex prime-target content, all participants reveal priming effects. In summary, we argue that experts' visuocognitive processing is rooted in a more efficient visuocognition due to stored chunks of checking and mating constellations. We suggest that visuocognitive limitations are related also to the prime-target complexity as well as to the task. Further investigations must be conducted in order to elucidate the factors with an increased impact on chess players' performance. (shrink)

This chapter has four parts. I distinguishes some types of perceptual skills and highlights their importance in everyday perception. II identifies a well-studied class of perceptual skills: cases of perceptual expertise. III discusses a less studied possible instance of perceptual skill: picture perception. Finally, IV outlines some important mechanisms underlying perceptual skills, with special emphasis on attention and mental imagery.

Acquiring expertise in a task is often thought of as an automatic process that follows inevitably with practice according to the log‐log law (aka: power law) of learning. However, as Ericsson, Chase, and Faloon (1980) showed, this is not true for digit‐span experts and, as we show, it is certainly not true for Tetris players at any level of expertise. Although some people may simply “twitch” faster than others, the limit to Tetris expertise is not raw keypress (...) time but the techniques acquired by players that allow them to use the tools provided by the hardware and software to compensate for the game's relentlessly increasing drop speed. Unfortunately, these increases in drop speed between Tetris levels make performance plateaus very short and quickly followed by game death. Hence, a player's success at discovering, exploring, and practicing new techniques for the tasks of board preparation, board maintenance, optimal placement discovery, zoid rotation, lateral movement of zoids, and other tasks important to expertise in Tetris is limited. In this paper, we analyze data collected from 492 Tetris players to reveal the challenges they confronted while constructing expertise via the discovery of new techniques for gameplay at increasingly difficult levels of Tetris. (shrink)

Perceptual learning is an enduring change in the perceptual system – and our resulting perceptions – due to practice or repeated exposure to a perceptual stimulus. It is involved in the acquisition of perceptual expertise: the ability to make rapid and reliable high-level categorizations of objects unavailable to novices. Attentional weighting is one process by which perceptual learning occurs. Advancing our understanding of this process is of particular importance for understanding what is learned in (...) perceptual learning. Attentional weighting seems to favour the hypothesis that what experts learn is simply to better direct their attention to elements of the stimulus relevant to making post-perceptual categorizations. Here I argue against this hypothesis. Attentional weighting is an integral component of the process that allows experts to come to represent high-level properties in perceptual experience. (shrink)

Expertise is traditionally classified into perceptual, cognitive, and motor forms. I argue that the empirical research literature on expertise gives us compelling reasons to reject this traditional classification and accept an alternative. According to the alternative I support there is expertise in forming impressions, which further divides into expertise in forming sensory and intellectual impressions, and there is expertise in performing actions, which further divides into expertise in performing mental and bodily actions. The (...) traditional category of cognitive expertise splits into two--expertise in forming intellectual impressions and expertise in performing mental actions. I consider and address a challenge to my case in favor of adopting this alternative classification of expertise that derives from dual process theories of cognition. (shrink)

Acquiring expertise in a task is often thought of as an automatic process that follows inevitably with practice according to the log‐log law (aka: power law) of learning. However, as Ericsson, Chase, and Faloon (1980) showed, this is not true for digit‐span experts and, as we show, it is certainly not true for Tetris players at any level of expertise. Although some people may simply “twitch” faster than others, the limit to Tetris expertise is not raw keypress (...) time but the techniques acquired by players that allow them to use the tools provided by the hardware and software to compensate for the game's relentlessly increasing drop speed. Unfortunately, these increases in drop speed between Tetris levels make performance plateaus very short and quickly followed by game death. Hence, a player's success at discovering, exploring, and practicing new techniques for the tasks of board preparation, board maintenance, optimal placement discovery, zoid rotation, lateral movement of zoids, and other tasks important to expertise in Tetris is limited. In this paper, we analyze data collected from 492 Tetris players to reveal the challenges they confronted while constructing expertise via the discovery of new techniques for gameplay at increasingly difficult levels of Tetris. (shrink)

This is a reply to the critical commentaries of Zed Adams, Zoe Drayson, Chris Mole, and Aleksandra Mroczko-Wąsowicz. The unifying theme across all four commentaries is the question: just how radical are the ideas contained in, and implied by, Thinking and Perceiving? Does the abandonment of the modularity of mind, and an embrace of the malleability of mind, have wide reaching consequences for empirical studies of sensory perception, for cognitive architecture, for the metaphysics of mind and the epistemology of perception? (...) And which of those consequences are welcomed, and which of those are problematic? These general questions anchor in (at least) the following topics: learning and the role of cognition, object recognition, perceptual expertise, early versus late vision, perception and truth, virtue epistemology, and computational architectures of mind. This reply attempts to address the overarching question from this variety of angles taken in the four commentaries. (shrink)

The basis of perception is the processing and categorization of perceptual stimuli from the environment. Much progress has been made in the science of perceptual categorization. Yet there is still no consensus on how the brain generates sensory individuals, from sensory input and perceptual categories in memory. This chapter argues that perceptual categorization is highly variable across perceivers due to their use of different perceptual strategies for solving perceptual problems they encounter, and that the (...) perceptual system structurally adjusts to the strategies that are most successful. Despite this variability, the different sensory individuals that result when different perceivers rely on different strategies nonetheless correspond to actual external world objects/features. This view is called 'perceptual pluralism'. (shrink)

Entry in Routledge handbook of skill and expertise. Discusses social perception, perceptual expertise, knowing what things look like, and a bit about about aesthetics at the end.

Perceptual modalities have been traditionally considered the product of dedicated biological systems producing information for higher cognitive processing. Psychological and neuropsychological evidence is offered which undermines this point of view and an alternative account of modality from the enactive approach to understanding cognition is suggested. Under this view, a perceptual modality is a stable form of perception which is structured not just by the biological sensitivities of the agent, but by their goals and the set of skills or (...) expertise which they are deploying at a given time. Such a view suggests that there is no such thing as an experience that is purely visual, auditory, or otherwise modal and that our attempts to understand consciousness and the mind must be conducted within a framework that provides an account of embodied, goal-directed adaptive coping with the world. (shrink)

This study explores the effect of individuation training on the acquisition of race-specific expertise. First, we investigated whether practice individuating other-race faces yields improvement in perceptual discrimination for novel faces of that race. Second, we asked whether there was similar improvement for novel faces of a different race for which participants received equal practice, but in an orthogonal task that did not require individuation. Caucasian participants were trained to individuate faces of one race (African American or Hispanic) and (...) to make difficult eye-luminance judgments on faces of the other race. By equating these tasks we are able to rule out raw experience, visual attention, or performance/success-induced positivity as the critical factors that produce race-specific improvements. These results indicate that individuation practice is one mechanism through which cognitive, perceptual, and/or social processes promote growth of the own-race face recognition advantage. (shrink)

Background. Attending to goal-relevant information can leave us metaphorically ‘blind’ or ‘deaf’ to the next relevant information while searching among distracters. This temporal cost lasting for about a half a second on the human selective attention has been long explored using the attentional blink paradigm. Although there is evidence that certain visual stimuli relating to one’s area of expertise can be less susceptible to attentional blink effects, it remains unexplored whether the dynamics of temporal selective attention vary with (...) class='Hi'>expertise and objects types in the auditory modality. Methods. Using the auditory version of the attentional blink paradigm, the present study investigates whether certain auditory objects relating to musical and perceptual expertise could have an impact on the transient costs of selective attention. In this study, expert cellists and novice participants were asked to first identify a target sound, and then to detect instrumental timbres of cello or organ, or human voice as a second target in a rapid auditory stream. Results. The results showed moderate evidence against the attentional blink effect for voices independent of participants’ musical expertise. Experts outperformed novices in their overall accuracy levels of target identification and detection, reflecting a clear benefit of musical expertise. Importanly, the musicianship advantage disappeared when the human voices served as the second target in the stream. Discussion. The results are discussed in terms of stimulus salience, the advantage of voice processing, as well as perceptual and musical expertise in relation to attention and working memory performances. (shrink)

Several authors have hailed intuition as one of the defining features of expertise. In particular, while disagreeing on almost anything that touches on human cognition and artificial intelligence, Hubert Dreyfus and Herbert Simon agreed on this point. However, the highly influential theories of intuition they proposed differed in major ways, especially with respect to the role given to search and as to whether intuition is holistic or analytic. Both theories suffer from empirical weaknesses. In this paper, we show how, (...) with some additions, a recent theory of expert memory (the template theory) offers a coherent and wide-ranging explanation of intuition in expert behaviour. It is shown that the theory accounts for the key features of intuition: it explains the rapid onset of intuition and its perceptual nature, provides mechanisms for learning, incorporates processes showing how perception is linked to action and emotion, and how experts capture the entirety of a situation. In doing so, the new theory addresses the issues problematic for Dreyfus’s and Simon’s theories. Implications for research and practice are discussed. (shrink)

In this commentary on Dustin Stokes’ Thinking and Perceiving, I focus on his discussion of perceptual expertise. This discussion occurs in the context of his case against modularity assumptions that underlie much contemporary theorizing about perception. As I suggest, there is much to be gained from thinking about considerations about perceptual expertise in conjunction with considerations about imaginative skill. In particular, I offer three different lessons that we can learn by way of the joint consideration of (...) these two phenomena. (shrink)

One Stoic response to the skeptical indistinguishability argument is that it fails to account for expertise: the Stoics allow that while two similar objects create indistinguishable appearances in the amateur, this is not true of the expert, whose appearances succeed in discriminating the pair. This paper re-examines the motivations for this Stoic response, and argues that it reveals the Stoic claim that, in generating a kataleptic appearance, the perceiver’s mind is active, insofar as it applies concepts matching the (...) class='Hi'>perceptual stimulus. I argue that this claim is reflected in the Stoic definition of the kataleptic appearance, and that it respects their more general account of mental representation. I further suggest that, in attributing some activity to the mind in creating each kataleptic appearance, and in claiming that the expert’s mind allows her to form more kataleptic appearances than the amateur, the Stoics draw inspiration from the wax tablet model in Plato’s Theaetetus (190e–196d), where Socrates distinguishes the wise from the ignorant on the basis of how well they match sensory input with its appropriate mental ‘seal’ (σφραγίς). (shrink)

In this short comment on Dustin Stokes's Thinking and Perceiving, I attempt to clarify what is at stake in the debate between Fodorian modularists and Stokean anti-modularists.

How flexible is language? To what extent does language 'absorb' individual differences, for example physical interaction, in knowledge acquisition within a domain? Current neuropsychological findings show that conceptual knowledge is embodied. When reading the word 'cinnamon', supportive neural activity includes brain areas usually engaged in perceptual tasks. Such findings suggest that perceptual and somatosensory processes influence the conceptual knowledge of the competent language user. Here, I explore what I name the 'plasticity' of language, to hone in on characteristics (...) of language, which, once language is in place, might lessen the necessity of physical interaction with the environment during knowledge acquisition. Linguistic knowledge is acquired by way of structures that contain representations of previous physical interactions. This could explain how a person's experiences transcend the boundary of the individual and meaningfully translate into linguistic knowledge accessible to others, as seems to be the case in so-called interactional expertise; expertise acquired without physical interaction. (shrink)

In recent epistemology many philosophers have adhered to a moderate foundationalism according to which some beliefs do not depend on other beliefs for their justification. Reliance on such ‘basic beliefs’ pervades both internalist and externalist theories of justification. In this article I argue that the phenomenon of perceptual learning – the fact that certain ‘expert’ observers are able to form more justified basic beliefs than novice observers – constitutes a challenge for moderate foundationalists. In order to accommodate perceptual (...) learning cases, the moderate foundationalist will have to characterize the ‘expertise’ of the expert observer in such a way that it cannot be had by novice observers and that it bestows justification on expert basic beliefs independently of any other justification had by the expert. I will argue that the accounts of expert basic beliefs currently present in the literature fail to meet this challenge, as they either result in a too liberal ascription of justification or fail to draw a clear distinction between expert basic beliefs and other spontaneously formed beliefs. Nevertheless, some guidelines for a future solution will be provided. (shrink)

In sport, perceptual skill training software is intended to assist tactical training in the field. The aim of this field study was to test whether ‘laboratory-based’ pattern recall training would augment tactical skill training performed on the field. Twenty-six soccer players between 14-16 years of age from a single team participated in this study and were divided into three groups. The first received field training on a specific tactical skill plus cognitive training sessions on the pattern recall task. The (...) second performed only the field training while the third group served as a control group and had field training on other topics. The task on the pre-, post- and retention tests was to recall specific soccer patterns displayed on a computer screen. Results showed significant changes between pre- to post-test performance. There was no significant interaction between groups and tests but the effect size was large. From pre- to retention-test, there was a significant difference between tests and an interaction between groups and tests, but no main effect difference between groups. On the basis of significance testing only retention was affected by the additional training, however, descriptive results and effect sizes from pre- to post-test were as expected and suggested there were learning benefits. Together these results indicate that augmented perceptual-cognitive training might be beneficial, but some limitations in our study design (e.g., missing field test, missing placebo group, etc.) need to be improved in future work. (shrink)

Here I propose an interpretation of the ancient Stoic psychological theory on which (i) the concepts that an adult human possesses affect the content of the perceptual impressions (φαντασίαι αἰσθητικαί) she forms, and (ii) the content of such impressions is exhausted by an ‘assertible’ (ἀξίωμα) of suitable complexity. What leads the Stoics to accept (i) and (ii), I argue, is their theory of assent and belief formation, which requires that the perceptual impression communicate information suitable to serve as (...) the content of belief. In arguing for (i), I reject a rival interpretation on which conceptualization occurs subsequently to the formation of a perceptual impression. In arguing for (ii), I deny that perceptual impressions have two kinds of content: one formulated in an assertible, the other sensory, featuring independently of this assertible. I explore the implications of (i) and (ii) for the Stoic theory of emotions, expertise, and rationality, and argue that they shed new light on the workings of impression, assent, and belief. (shrink)

Previous accounts of how people develop expertise have focused on how deliberate practice transforms the cognitive and perceptual representations and processes that give rise to expertise. However, the likelihood of developing expertise with a particular tool may also depend on the degree to which that tool fits pre‐existing perceptual and cognitive abilities. The present studies explored whether the abacus—a descendent of the first human computing devices—may have evolved to exploit general biases in human visual attention, (...) or whether developing expertise with the abacus requires learning special strategies for allocating visual attention to the abacus. To address this question, we administered a series of visual search tasks to abacus experts and subjects who had little to no abacus experience, in which search targets and distractors were overlaid atop abacus “beads.” Across three studies, we found that both experts and naïve subjects were faster to detect targets in semantically relevant components of the abacus, suggesting that abacus training is not required to exhibit attentional biases toward these components of the abacus. This finding suggests that the attentional biases that scaffold numerical processing of the abacus may emerge from general properties of visual attention that are exploited by the design of the abacus itself. (shrink)

In order to systematically evaluate perceptual anticipation between experts and non-experts for different kinds of combat sports, we needed to perform a comprehensive assessment. In this systematic review and meta-analysis, we searched four English-language and three Chinese-language databases that used expert/non-expert research paradigms, to explore perceptual anticipation in combat sports. We employed a random effects model for pooled analyses using the inverse variance method. We included 27 eligible studies involving 233 datasets in this meta-analysis. We observed large effect (...) sizes for the differences between experts and non-experts in both response accuracy and reaction time. We also observed substantial differences between experts and non-experts in the mean duration of visual fixations per trial, but not in the visual fixation duration. Taken together, high-level combat athletes have more advantages in perceptual anticipation than lower-level athletes, showing faster and more accurate responses when facing the opponent's attacks, as well as focusing on fewer points of visual fixations than novice athletes. Different types of combat sports and stimulus presentations affect perceptual anticipation abilities to varying extents in relation to outcome measures, with more pronounced expertise in a stimulus that is closer to real-world situations.Systematic review registrationhttps://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/display_record.php?ID=CRD42021226343, PROSPERO CRD42021226343. (shrink)

We argue for an example of based on Diamond and Carey's (1986) work on expertise and recognition, which is not made use of in The Origin of Concepts. This mechanism for perceptual learning seems to have all the necessary characteristics in that it is innate, domain-specific (requires stimulus sets possessing a certain structure), and demonstrably affects categorisation in a way that strongly suggests it will influence concept formation as well.

This article investigates whether religious experience can be conceived in such a way that the perceiver's religious expertise (via cognitive penetration or perceptual learning) contributes to the justificatory power of the experience. It also considers what kind of content religious experience would have to have to be able to justify standard types of religious beliefs. It argues that, against first impressions, religious expertise cannot supplement perceptual justification. At the same time, to the extent that religious experience (...) has singular contents or Gestalt contents, it may well be able to justify religious belief in virtue of such contents. (shrink)