Background, Experiments No comments yet

Your photographs can participate in our research too

By palmerit on February 21st, 2011

Our experiments on birding expertise require having a huge number of bird pictures. Not only do we we need pictures of many different species of birds, we need many different examples of every species of bird.

Why? One reason is that even non-experts have tremendously good visual memories for pictures. For example, in one study, after studying thousands of pictures, people were nearly 90% accurate at discriminating old pictures they had studied for just a few seconds from new pictures that differed only subtly from the studied pictures.1 That means that we cannot use the same picture more than once in a single experiment or use the same pictures across different experiments.

Our goal is to collect dozens of pictures of every species of bird we will use in our experiments. To do that, we need your help.

If you have your bird photographs on sites like flickr, picasa, smugmug, or any of the dozens of other photo sharing websites, we’d love to be able to use them in our research. We only need to know that the photos have been accurately labeled by species.

We assure you that your photographs will be used for research purposes only. Our experiments usually present relatively low-resolution images, typically around 400-800 pixels wide, so no high resolution versions will ever be accessible on the web.

Please email thomas.j.palmeri@vanderbilt.edu or michael.mack@vanderbilt.edu if you would like to discuss letting your bird photographs participate in our research.

1. Brady, T. F., Konkle, T., Alvarez, G. A. and Oliva, A. (2008). Visual long-term memory has a massive storage capacity for object details. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 105 (38), 14325-14329. [PDF]

Background No comments yet

Demographics of the American Birder

By palmerit on February 8th, 2011

As part of our research on birding expertise, we came across a widely cited 2006 demographic and economic analysis of birding in the United States, published by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.1,2 The full report can be read from the links provided below. Here are some highlights.

  • In 2006, there were 48 million birders in the U.S. Of these, 20 million took trips away from home to bird.
  • 54% of birders are female, 46% male.
  • Birders tend to come from higher education and income levels.
  • The average birder is 50 years old.
  • Nearly $36 billion was spent by birders in 2006; over $12 billion on trip-related expenditures, over $23 billion on equipment.
  • These birding expenditures created 671,000 jobs and $28 billion in employment income.

1. Birding in the United States: A demographic and economic analysis (Addendum to the 2006 National Survey of Fishing, Hunting, and Wildlife-Associated Recreation, Report 2006-4), U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. library.fws.gov/pubs/birding_natsurvey06.pdf
2. Pullis La Rouche, G. (2006). Birding in the United States: a demographic and economic analysis. Waterbirds around the world. Eds. G.C. Boere, C.A. Galbraith and D.A. Stroud. The Stationery Office, Edinburgh, UK. pp. 841–46. JNCC.gov.uk

Background No comments yet

Follow this blog with RSS, Facebook, Twitter, or email

By palmerit on January 15th, 2011

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You can follow this blog with RSS, Facebook, Twitter, or by email. As new blog posts are made, they will appear on these sources.

Background, Experiments No comments yet

You can participate in our research

By palmerit on December 21st, 2010

We are looking for birders of all levels of experience to participate in a large-scale project examining how perception and memory for birds differ across novices, beginners, and experts of all levels. We really do mean all levels of experience, from the true beginner to the expert with decades of study.

The experiments are all online on the web. They measure your ability to remember and identify birds and other animals and objects. Most experiments are fairly short, taking about half an hour to complete. They can be done on any computer, wherever and whenever you decide to do them, although we do encourage you to do the experiments in a quiet place at a time when you expect little interruption.

This is the web site for the experiments: http://expertise.psy.vanderbilt.edu

Once you register your own login id and password on the site, you will be able to participate in any experiments that are available. We expect to add new experiments over time.

Some experiments include a modest compensation.

Background, Experts, Perceptual Expertise No comments yet

Why birding expertise?

By palmerit on November 28th, 2010

Birders love to watch birds. Why would anyone ever want to watch birders?

Many birds are shy and have little interest in being seen. Expert birders are skilled at making rapid identifications at a glance, often under less than ideal conditions with poor light and camouflage from dense foliage. For ornithologists in the field, accurate identification of what birds there are, how many there are, as well as an accurate accounting of what birds are not there, is critical to research and conservation. Identification accuracy is also valued by a significant proportion of the birding community who regularly take part in citizen science efforts during formal and informal bird counts. Accuracy is desired to have a valid count. Speed is required because birds do not often stick around for very long.

Birding expertise shares many characteristics with other forms of perceptual expertise that require fast and accurate fine-grained identification of objects under difficult conditions. What we learn by studying bird experts may generalize to other kinds of perceptual expertise.

Furthermore, studying birders has certain advantages in that there are millions of people in the US alone who consider bird watching a hobby, spending many hours in their yards and local parks, spending billions of dollars annually on books, equipment, and travel.1 Scientifically, it is much easier to study a domain of expertise with millions of possible participants than a more esoteric domain with far fewer adherents.

Many birders are interested in science. Many are scientists. They recognize the importance of contributing their bird observations during events like the Christmas Bird Count, the Great Backyard Bird Count, other semiannual counts sponsored by Audubon and ornithological societies, and more informal counts through mechanisms like Cornell Laboratory’s ebird. Through this blog, we hope that birders will also be interested in the scientific study of their unique expertise and that they may be interested in participating in our ongoing research as well.

1. Pullis La Rouche, G. (2006). Birding in the United States: a demographic and economic analysis. Waterbirds around the world. Eds. G.C. Boere, C.A. Galbraith and D.A. Stroud. The Stationery Office, Edinburgh, UK. pp. 841–46. JNCC.gov.uk, PDF

Background, Perceptual Expertise No comments yet

Perceptual Expertise: Bridging Brain and Behavior

By palmerit on November 9th, 2010

Perceptual Expertise: Bridging Brain and Behavior
Isabel Gauthier, Michael Tarr, and Daniel Bub (Eds.)
Oxford University Press, 2009
“This book surveys the study of perceptual expertise in visual object recognition, introducing a variety of questions, research findings, and extant issues that have emerged from recent studies of face, object, and letter recognition. The book also discusses a novel collaborative model, codified as the “Perceptual Expertise Network.” The central idea of this group effort is an emphasis on domain-general principles of high-level visual learning that can account for how different object categories are processed and come to be associated with spatially localized activity in the primate brain. The approach brings together different traditions and techniques critical to cognitive neuroscience, such as psychophysics, human brain imaging, monkey physiology, developmental work, neuropsychological studies, and computational modeling. In 12 chapters, members of the Perceptual Expertise Network and their collaborators review how face perception motivated the study of perceptual expertise with objects, how face expertise develops in children, how different kinds of experience result in different degrees of expertise, and how perceptual expertise can break down in individuals with autism or different forms of deficits in perception. They describe advances and challenges in developing models to account for expertise, including the need to account for competition between different domains of expertise and to specify the functional locus of effects of expertise. They introduce more recent directions in the study of expertise, including research on expertise with letters and research investigating the interactions between perception and conception. Finally, they discuss the difficulties in relating high-level perceptual impairments and brain-based evidence to normal performance.”

Background, Perceptual Expertise No comments yet

Perceptual Expertise Network

By palmerit on October 26th, 2010

Some of the research that will be described in this blog was conducted by members of the Perceptual Expertise Network (PEN). PEN is a collaborative research network first established 10 years ago with a grant from the James S. McDonnell Foundation to Isabel Gauthier at Vanderbilt University.

Traditionally, most research in psychology and neuroscience has been competitive. Individual laboratories race to be the first to discover some principle of behavior or the brain. PEN instead adopted a collaborative model of research, with multiple investigators coming together to answer larger question of behavior and the brain. While this approach is now becoming more the norm, it was a unique approach when PEN was first established.

By design, PEN includes scientists with a diversity of backgrounds and areas of methodological expertise. Current and past members are:
Marlene Behrmann (Carnegie Mellon University) psychophysics, neuropsychology, fMRI
Daniel Bub (University of Victoria) neuropsychology
Gary Cottrell (UCSD) machine learning, computational neuroscience
Tim Curran (University of Colorado) ERP
Isabel Gauthier (Vanderbilt University) psychophysics, fMRI
Thomas Palmeri (Vanderbilt University) psychophysics, computational modeling
Bob Schultz (Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia) clinical neuropsychology, fMRI
David Sheinberg (Brown University) neurophysiology
James Tanaka (University of Victoria) psychophysics, ERP
Michael Tarr (Carnegie Mellon University) psychophysics, fMRI

Bob Schultz has since stepped down from PEN, but we have been recently joined by
David Plaut (Carnegie Mellon) computational neuroscience
Suzy Scherf (Carnegie Mellon) developmental neuroscience

In addition to the core faculty, PEN includes several dozen postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and undergraduates who play a critical role in all research. Many former trainees in PEN are now faculty at leading universities in the US and Canada.

Some members of PEN may contribute to this blog in the future.

The figure below illustrates the growing collaborations within PEN through 2006, when PEN joined forces with other researchers to create the Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center (TDLC), an NSF Science of Learning Center. TDLC is directed by Gary Cottrell. PEN is currently co-led by Isabel Gauthier and Thomas Palmeri.

Background, Experts, Perceptual Expertise No comments yet

Why do we study perceptual expertise?

By palmerit on October 19th, 2010

Why would scientists study perceptual expertise?

Psychologists and neuroscientists conduct basic scientific research on how we see, remember, and think. What happens when people develop perceptual expertise? What makes an expert an expert? Do they see the world differently? Do they remember different? Do they think differently?

What is happening in the brains of experts? Just like gifted athletes push the limits of their bodies, perceptual experts push the limits of their perceptual systems. Studying individuals with extreme abilities gives us a unique window on the limits of neural plasticity, how the brain changes with experience.

Understanding experts involves understanding how people become experts. Scientists conduct studies where people develop forms of expertise for novel objects created in the laboratory. If we can understand how people become experts, maybe we can understand how to train people to become better experts, and how to train them to become experts more quickly and efficiently.

But understanding perceptual expertise is more than understanding individuals with idiosyncratic skills in highly specialized domains. Perceptual expertise may also explain some of the unique aspects of forms of everyday expertise that we all have, recognizing such things as faces, words, or letters.

In fact, viewing faces, words, and letters as domains of perceptual expertise has yielded important insights into how ravages of brain damage might lead to the perceptual and cognitive deficits seen in conditions like autism, dyslexia, agnosia, and other conditions, and can possibly lead to breakthroughs in intervention and treatment. We will eventually discuss some of the applications of perceptual expertise research in these areas.

Background, Experts, Perceptual Expertise No comments yet

What is perceptual expertise?

By palmerit on September 21st, 2010

Consider the TSA agent screening luggage for potential weapons, the radiologist looking for evidence of lung disease, the geospatial analyst scanning satellite imagery for resource management, the dog show judge deciding best in show, the birding enthusiast leading the local Christmas Bird Count, or the car nut who not only tells you the make and model but what year a car was made.

They are all perceptual experts.

It is not just that perceptual experts know more than novices. Every birder in North American can probably recognize a Green Jay. I bet few novices living outside of South Texas know the name of this beautiful, distinctive bird. On top of that rich knowledge, perceptual experts seem to see things that novices simply miss.

I will always remember the sheer joy seeing my son Matthew in a sonogram for the first time. That joy wasn’t really diminished when our ObGyn told me that what I thought was my son’s head was actually my wife’s kidney and that he was, in truth, positioned 90 degree from what I thought I was actually seeing in the image.

My son is now 12. At a glance, he’ll easily recognize a bird flying far off in the distance or one that whizzes by. Most of the time, those initial impressions are verified with some more careful views. Usually I can’t even find a bird, let alone have any clue what kind of bird it might be.

Even with his skills, my son knows he has more to learn. During spring migration, it’s just amazing seeing some of the experts in our local birding group quicky and effortlessly identify half a dozen or more different warbler species in quick succession. When I can find the birds, I usually can’t even tell that they are different species, let alone ever try to learn the names of any of them. Then again, I’m kind of a hopeless cause. On more than one occasion, I’ve snapped a really nice picture of a bird and excitedly asked Matthew to identify it for me. “Dad, that’s just a robin,” has been his response more than once.

We are interested in what perceptual experts know, what they can remember, and how they perceive compared to novices. To be clear, perceptual experts are not (usually) expert perceivers in general. Unless they are a physician too, an expert birder is no better at reading a sonogram than I am. Their perceptual expertise is limited to specific domains.

Background 1 comment

Goals for this blog

By palmerit on September 15th, 2010

Scientific research on the minds and brains of birders has shaped our understanding of how perception, memory, and the brain change as people develop expertise. This blog aims to share some of the past and current scientific findings and reflect on the insights of birders and their unique expertise.

First and foremost, we hope this blog will be of interest to members of the birding community. Many birders have contributed to research over the past two decades. This is our opportunity to give back.

We hope to interest birders in participating in our ongoing research.

We hope to learn something from birders by the comments you leave on our blog. We are experts on expertise. We are not expert birders. We can learn from the insights of experts about their own expertise.

We hope that questions left on our blog will inspire new blog entries in the future.

We look forward to hearing what you have to say.