Abstract
Studies in visual expertise focus on identifying mechanisms that allow experts to be more efficient and effective at identifying their items of expertise. Many visual expert groups, such as fingerprint examiners, are required to identify and characterize their items of expertise under visually demanding conditions. Therefore, one potential mechanism that develops could be a learned relative immunity to the effects of visual noise. To investigate this the present study uses a combination of EEG and behavioral measures to determine the effects of visual noise across the course of an extensive visual training paradigm. Participants were trained on a fingerprint identification tracing task that simulates the actual real-world training fingerprint examiners undergo. Throughout the course of training, participants performed a separate XAB task in which they were instructed to identify which of two clear print images matched a test image presented in bandpass filtered noise. To distinguish any training effects from those caused by repeated exposure to the XAB task, a separate control group who did not undergo any additional training was also measured. Results show significant overall behavioral improvements across both groups for the low visual demand condition and only improvements in the training group for the high visual demand condition. However, EEG data show a qualitative and quantitative shift in the P250 component in opposite directions between the control and training group across both conditions. This interaction provides evidence that training causes a change in neural processing that is separate from that which results from repeated exposure. These results have potential implications to both the perceptual learning and visual expertise literature and point to the possibility of different types of learning styles that develop for visually complex stimuli in degraded conditions.