title: Studying real-world perceptual expertise.
abstract: Significant insights into visual cognition have come from studying real-world perceptual expertise. Many have previously reviewed empirical findings and theoretical developments from this work. Here we instead provide a brief perspective on approaches, considerations, and challenges to studying real-world perceptual expertise. We discuss factors like choosing to use real-world versus artificial object domains of expertise, selecting a target domain of real-world perceptual expertise, recruiting experts, evaluating their level of expertise, and experimentally testing experts in the lab and online. Throughout our perspective, we highlight expert birding (also called birdwatching) as an example, as it has been used as a target domain for over two decades in the perceptual expertise literature.
authors.affiliation: Vanderbilt Vision Research Center, Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University Nashville, TN, USA.
authors.forename: Jianhong
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Shen
authors.affiliation: Center for Learning and Department of Psychology, The University of Texas at Austin Austin, TX, USA.
authors.forename: Michael L
authors.initials: ML
authors.lastname: Mack
authors.affiliation: Vanderbilt Vision Research Center, Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University Nashville, TN, USA.
authors.forename: Thomas J
authors.initials: TJ
authors.lastname: Palmeri
keywords: birding; categorization; expertise; learning; perceptual expertise; recognition