Date of Award

Spring 2024

Thesis Type

Open Access

Degree Name

Honors Bachelor of Arts

Department

Psychology

Sponsor

Dr.Juan Guevara-Pinto

Committee Member

Dr. Paul Harris

Committee Member

Dr. Kasandra Riley

Abstract

Expertise as defined in literature is the peak or otherwise exceptionally high levels of performance on a particular task or within a given domain (Papesh et al., 2021). In this study, expertise is defined as the time length the individual has spent in their field. For the purpose of this research, an expert can exist in a plethora of fields ranging from history and music to mathematics or science. Becoming an expert requires for the individual to not only have the mental and cognitive concepts that come with acquiring this type of knowledge, but it also incorporates skills they know in terms of their tools that are specific to their field alone (Kramer et al., 2019). On the other hand, novices are those that lack the necessary tools and knowledge required to succeed to the best of their ability. This eventually leads to general problem-solving strategies that more often than not induce a stressful environment and generate a cognitive load from juggling multiple things at once. This study investigated interactions between educational expertise and how this translates to perceptual experiences of an individua in order to elucidate the relationship between academic expertise in an individual’s field with their visual perception. Participants were recruited to complete two visually based experiments, a visual search task and the Navon Figure task. They were separated into two groups based on the individual characteristics-expertise and academic major. In all, there were no statistically significant main effects nor interactions found between the different experimental groups. Though there were no significant findings, there were patterns such as a longer expertise positively correlating with a faster reaction time. With some methodological adjustments, ie. a large sample size, this could lead to significant findings.

Rights Holder

Ashley Sawyer

Download

Share

COinS