Vermeiren, A. 1 , Beyens, U. 1 , Fu, Q. 2 & Cleeremans, A. 1
1 Université Libre de Bruxelles
2 Chinese Academy of Sciences
Expertise in a certain domain can increase the visibility for stimuli from that domain. For example, car experts will recognize a car better when they see a flash of a car on the street. Here, we study whether expertise can influence not only the objective identification performance, but also the subjective feeling of having seen a stimulus. Chinese and European participants were asked to identify chinese and maya signs which were presented only for a short amount of time (16 ms). Furthermore, they were asked to rate their awareness of the stimuli. It was found that both identification and awareness were higher for the chinese signs than for the maya signs when testing Chinese participants, while the opposite was true for the European participants. This effect started already at very short SOA’s (stimulus-onset-asynchrony) between the stimulus and the post-mask. This suggests that early on in the visual processing stream, feedback loops render previous knowledge (expertise) available, allowing identification performance and subjective awareness of visual objects to increase more rapidly.