Alan C.-N. Wong

• BSSc, MPhil, PhD
• University of Surrey

Research on multitasking has adopted a diverse range of simple paradigms covering concurrent multitasking and task-switching scenarios, alongside more complex paradigms simulating real-life situations more closely. Investigating the relationships among them is essential for uncovering shared cognitive mechanisms, advancing a unified theory of multi...

Absolute pitch (AP) refers to the ability to identify the pitch of a tone without external references. It is commonly believed that only individuals with special genetic makeup and early musical training within the critical period can develop AP. Recent studies have begun to challenge the critical period notion by showing the possibility of AP acqu...

Individuals with schizophrenia show impairments in a variety of selective attention tasks. Research on the negative priming (NP) effect in schizophrenia has yielded mixed evidence. This meta-analysis aimed to examine the NP effect exhibited by patients with schizophrenia and the impact of study methodology on findings. The methods and reporting of...

Absolute pitch (AP) refers to the naming of musical tone without external reference. The influential two‐component model states that AP is limited by the late‐emerging pitch labeling process only and not the earlier perceptual and memory processes. Over the years, however, support for this model at the neural level has been mixed with various metho...

We investigated the relationship between holistic processing and face processing using a latent variables approach. Three versions of the composite paradigm were used to measure holistic processing: Vanderbilt Holistic Face Processing Test, a sequential composite matching task, and a simultaneous composite matching task. Three tasks were used to me...

Recently, paradigms in the face recognition literature have been adopted to reveal holistic processing in word recognition. It is unknown, however, whether different measures of holistic word processing share similar underlying mechanisms, and whether fluent word reading relies on holistic word processing. We measured holistic processing effects in...

The role of visual shape processing in skilled reading is an understudied topic. This study focused on the role of visual and visual association skills in a type of skilled reading, music sight-reading, which refers to the ability to play a piece of music when one reads the score for the first time. One hundred and 43 intermediate-to-advanced music...

Research showed mixed findings regarding the relationships between daily multitasking experience and laboratory multitasking performance. One measurement issue was the low reliability and validity of using a single measurement for daily multitasking experience. Another measurement issue was the popular use of simple laboratory paradigms that may or...

The other-race effect (ORE) is a well-known phenomenon in which people discriminate and recognize faces from their ethnic group more accurately than faces from other ethnic groups. Holistic processing, or the mandatory tendency to process all parts of an object together, has been proposed as an explanation for the ORE. According to the holistic per...

Recent studies showed that task demand affects object representations in higher‐level visual areas and beyond but not so much in earlier areas. There are, however, limitations in those studies including the relatively weak manipulation of task due to the use of familiar real‐life objects, the low temporal resolution in functional magnetic resonance...

Holistic processing has been shown with both faces and words, but it is unclear how similar their underlying mechanisms are. In this study attention to global and local features was manipulated and the consequences for holistic word and face processing were examined. On each trial participants were presented two Navon figures and told to focus on e...

This study explores the theoretical proposal that developmental dyslexia involves a failure to develop perceptual expertise with words despite adequate education. Among a group of Hong Kong Chinese children diagnosed with developmental dyslexia, we investigated the relationship between Chinese word reading and perceptual expertise with Chinese char...

Human multitasking is typically defined as the practice of performing more than one task at the same time (dual task) or rapidly alternating between multiple tasks (task switching). The majority of research in multitasking has been focusing on individual paradigms, with surprisingly little effort in understanding their relationships. We adopted an...

There is a widespread stereotype that women are better at multitasking. Previous studies examining gender difference in multitasking used either a concurrent or sequential multitasking paradigm and offered mixed results. The present study examined a possibility that men were better at concurrent multitasking while women were better at task switchin...

Recognizing musical notation is an important skill to a full participation of Western classical music, but remains a largely under-researched topic in the psychology of music. One plausible reason of such omission is that, in the past, the research field has heavily relied on self-report of music reading ability, which was subjective and highly var...

At which phase(s) does task demand affect object processing? Previous studies showed that task demand affects object representations in higher-level visual areas but not so much in earlier areas. There are, however, limitations in those studies concerning the relatively weak manipulation of task due to the use of familiar real-life objects, and/or...

Absolute pitch (AP) refers to labelling individual pitches in the absence of external reference. A widely endorsed theory regards AP as a privileged ability enjoyed by selected few with rare genetic makeup and musical training starting in early childhood. However, recent evidence showed that even adults can learn AP, and some can attain a performan...

Holistic processing of visual words (i.e., obligatory encoding of/attending to all letters of a word) could be a marker of expert word recognition. In the present study, we thus examined for the first time whether there is a direct relation between the word-composite effect (i.e., all parts of a visual word are fully processed when observers perfor...

Objective: In the mating market, individuals differ in their aspirations to pursue opposite-sex mates who have a relatively higher (vs. similar) level of physical attractiveness. Few studies have explored how motivational concerns outside the mating domain can account for these individual differences in romantic aspiration. Based on regulatory foc...

Holistic processing, a hallmark of face processing, has been shown for written words, signaled by the word composite effect. Fluent readers find it harder to focus on one half of a written word (e.g., the first syllable of a CV.CV word) while ignoring the other half (e.g., the second syllable), especially when the two halves are aligned rather than...

Absolute pitch (AP) refers to the rare ability to name the pitch of a tone without external reference. It is widely believed to be only for the selected few with rare genetic makeup and early musical training during the critical period, and therefore acquiring AP in adulthood is impossible. Previous studies have not offered a strong test of the eff...

Visual expertise with musical notation is unique. Fluent music readers show selectively higher activity to musical notes than to other visually similar patterns in both the retinotopic and higher-level visual areas and both very early (e.g., C1) and later (e.g., N170) visual event-related potential (ERP) components. This is different from domains s...

There is substantial evidence for individual differences in personality and cognitive abilities, but we lack clear intuitions about individual differences in visual abilities. Previous work on this topic has typically compared performance with only 2 categories, each measured with only 1 task. This approach is insufficient for demonstration of doma...

Holistic processing has been regarded as a marker of perceptual expertise for many object categories. However, visual word processing, a common form of perceptual expertise in the population, is traditionally considered part-based instead of holistic, and whether it involves holistic processing remains inconclusive. In 4 experiments, we examined a...

Absolute pitch (AP) refers to the rare ability to name the pitch of a tone without external reference. It is widely believed that acquiring AP in adulthood is impossible, since AP is only for the selected few with rare genetic makeup and early musical training. In three experiments, we trained adults to name pitches for 12 to 40 hours. Within the t...

Criminal investigation often involves finding out what a suspect knows about people, such as victims and confederates, who are involved in the crime. This study explored the possibility of determining a person's recognition of other individuals by analyzing the steady-state visually evoked potentials (SSVEP) triggered by visual oscillations of fami...

Background. Human multitasking is typically defined as the practice of performing more than one task at the same time (dual-task) or rapidly alternating between multiple tasks (task switching). The majority of research in multitasking has been focusing on individual paradigms, with surprisingly little effort in understanding their relationships. Me...

Background. Human multitasking is typically defined as the practice of performing more than one task at the same time (dual-task) or rapidly alternating between multiple tasks (task switching). The majority of research in multitasking has been focusing on individual paradigms, with surprisingly little effort in understanding their relationships. Me...

Holistic processing has been regarded as a hallmark of face perception, indicating the automatic and obligatory tendency of the visual system to process all face parts as a perceptual unit rather than in isolation. Studies involving lateralized stimulus presentation suggest that the right hemisphere dominates holistic face processing. Holistic proc...

Previous work has shown that line junctions are informative features for visual perception of objects, letters, and words. However, the sources of such sensitivity and their generalizability to other object categories are largely unclear. We addressed these questions by studying perceptual expertise in reading musical notation, a domain in which in...

It is widely believed that couples look alike. Consistently, previous research reported higher facial similarity for couples than non-couples, and that facial similarity predicts marital satisfaction. However, it is unclear if facial similarity in couples shown in previous studies was solely driven by extrinsic features like hairstyle, glasses, etc...

Prior studies have shown that words show a composite effect: When readers perform a same-different matching task on a target-part of a word, performance is affected by the irrelevant part, whose influence is severely reduced when the two parts are misaligned. However, the locus of this word composite effect is largely unknown. To enlighten it, in t...

Crowding refers to the disrupted recognition of an object by nearby distractors. Prior work has shown that real-world music-reading experts experience reduced crowding specifically for musical stimuli. However, it is unclear whether music-reading training reduced the magnitude of crowding or whether individuals showing less crowding are more likely...

Holistic processing refers to the obligatory tendency to process objects as a whole rather than parts. It has been suggested to be a common potential marker for perceptual expertise across domains, including faces, cars, chessboards, musical notes, words, etc. However, whether there is an overlap in the underlying mechanisms for holistic processing...

Many theories and research findings have suggested that words are processed in a less holistic manner compared with faces, although most people have acquired a high level of perceptual expertise with both categories (e.g., Farah, 1998). Our recent studies using the composite paradigm have shown that words are also processed holistically, in that ob...

Regions of the ventral occipito-temporal (vOT) cortex show preferential activations to particular object categories, such as faces, words, tools and scenes. The origin of such category-selective activations has been a topic of intense debate. A functional magnetic resonance-adaptation (fMR-A) study was conducted to investigate one candidate princip...

To understand the neural correlates of expert object recognition, Harel et al. (2013) proposed the use of an existing theoretical framework (Mahon et al., 2007; Martin, 2007) that emphasizes the interaction between different parts of the visual pathway as well as between the visual and other cognitive systems. While we agree that focusing more on t...

We investigated how face-selective cortical areas process configural and componential face information and how race of faces may influence these processes. Participants saw blurred (preserving configural information), scrambled (preserving componential information), and whole faces during fMRI scan, and performed a post-scan face recognition task u...

This study examines the kinds of shape features that mediate basic- and subordinate-level object recognition. Observers were trained to categorize sets of novel objects at either a basic (between-families) or subordinate (within-family) level of classification. We analyzed the spatial distributions of fixations and compared them to model distributi...

Absolute pitch (AP) is widely believed to be a rare ability possessed by only a small group of gifted and special individuals (AP possessors). While AP has fascinated psychologists, neuroscientists, and musicians for more than a century, no theory can satisfactorily explain why this ability is so rare and difficult to learn. Here, we show that AP a...

Heavy media multitaskers (HMMs) are found to be inferior to light media multitaskers (LMMs) in cognitive functions such as updating and maintenance of working memory representations, selectively attention, and surprisingly, the ability to switch between tasks. Research on task-switching paradigm using a 2:1 mapping between cues and tasks separates...

Recent studies have found holistic processing to be a marker of expertise for perception of words in alphabetic (e.g., English) and non-alphabetic (e.g., Chinese) writing systems, consistent with what has been found for faces and other objects of face-like expertise. It is unknown, however, whether holistic processing of words occurs in an early, p...

Recent studies have found holistic processing to be a marker of expertise for perception of words in alphabetic (e.g., English) and non-alphabetic (e.g., Chinese) writing systems, consistent with what has been found for faces and other objects of face-like expertise. It is unknown, however, whether holistic processing of words occurs in an early, p...

Holistic processing has been associated with perceptual expertise in different domains involving faces, cars, fingerprints, musical notes, English words, etc. Curiously Chinese characters are regarded as an exception, as indicated by reduced holistic processing found for experts with the Chinese writing system as compared with novices. We revisit t...

Heavy media multitaskers have been found to perform poorly in certain cognitive tasks involving task switching, selective attention, and working memory. An account for this is that with a breadth-biased style of cognitive control, multitaskers tend to pay attention to various information available in the environment, without sufficient focus on the...

The type of experience involved with an object category has been regarded as one important factor in shaping of the human object recognition system. Laboratory training studies have shown that different kinds of learning experience with the same set of novel objects resulted in different perceptual and neural changes. Whether this applies to natura...

Holistic processing has been associated with perceptual expertise in different domains involving faces, cars, fingerprints, musical notes, English words, etc. Curiously Chinese characters are regarded as an exception, as indicated by reduced holistic processing found for experts with the Chinese writing system as compared with novices. We revisit t...

According to Farah's (1991) framework, recognition of different objects can be characterized by a continuum with faces at one extreme involving holistic processing, words at the other extreme involving part-based processing, and other objects somewhere in between. Face perception requires fine, subordinate-level individuation of similar objects, an...

Objective: This study investigated the effects of fencing expertise and physical fitness on the inhibitory control of fencers and non-fencers. Design: This study used a 2 x 2 factorial design. Fencers and non-fencers both in low-fit and averagely-fit subgroups were compared in reaction times (RT) and accuracy in simple reaction time (SRT) and go/no...

Word stimuli in Experiment 1. (DOC)

Word stimuli in Experiment 2. (DOC)

Perceptual expertise has been studied intensively with faces and object categories involving detailed individuation. A common finding is that experience in fulfilling the task demand of fine, subordinate-level discrimination between highly similar instances is associated with the development of holistic processing. This study examines whether holis...

Chronic heavy media multitaskers have been found impaired cognitive performance on certain cognitive tasks (Ophir, Nass & Wagner, 2009). However, the poor performance may be caused by their breadth-biased style of cognitive control rather than a deficit in cognitive abilities such as the ability to filter out interference from irrelevant stimuli an...

We examined whether holistic processing, a hallmark of face perception, took place at an early stage of face processing shared by all facial judgments, or at later stages specific for processing different facial information such as identity, expression and gender. In Study 1, a composite paradigm was used where the two face halves could differ in i...

Enhanced holistic processing (obligatory attention to all parts of an object) has been associated with different types of perceptual expertise involving faces, cars, fingerprints, musical notes, English words, etc. Curiously Chinese characters are regarded as an exception, as indicated by the lack of holistic processing found for experts (Hsiao and...

Perceptual expertise, even within the visual domain, can take many forms, depending on the goals of the practiced task and the visual information available to support performance. Given the same goals, expertise for different categories can recruit common perceptual resources, which could lead to interference during concurrent processing. We measur...

Letter strings can generally be expected to appear in texts in a regular font (typeface). Previous studies (e.g., Sanocki, 1987, 88, 91) show that people are sensitive to this regularity, with better recognition performance for letters appearing in the same font than mixed fonts. We hypothesize that extensive reading experience equips one with the...

Novices generally classify objects faster at the basic level than at a subordinate level of abstraction. However, experts can categorize equally fast at both levels (Tanaka & Taylor, 1991). Familiar faces can be categorized as accurately at the basic level (“face”) as at the subordinate/identity (“Tom Cruise”) level, even at short exposure duration...

In a previous study, Leek & Johnston (2008, Platform talk, Vision Science Society) showed that fixation patterns during three-dimensional object recognition show a preference for image regions containing local concave curvature minima at surface intersections. In this study we examined the extent to which fixation-based local shape analysis pattern...

Previous ERP and fMRI studies have shown that concurrent processing of units from alphabetic and non-alphabetic writing systems, such as Roman letters and Chinese characters, activate overlapping brain regions. It is unknown, however, whether different types of characters simply recruit separate yet nearby neural networks, or rather there are share...

Category selectivity in the visual system is frequently observed with fMRI, either as local or distributed patterns of activity for specific object categories like faces, tools, body parts, or letters. Experience can modify activity in object processing areas, as demonstrated by the engagement of face-selective areas after subordinate-level individ...

Recent work by Grill-Spector and Kanwisher (2005) examined the time course of visual object recognition, contrasting accuracy at object detection, basic-level categorization, and subordinate-level identification across a range of image presentation durations. One intriguing result was that the time-course of object detection and basic-level categor...

In their recent TiCS contribution, Op de Beeck and Baker [1] (hereafter OB) suggest we abandon the idea that fairly local changes, limited to a single visual area, support visual learning. Instead, they propose that visual experience causes moderate and distributed changes that modulate pre-existing representations. We argue that their review overl...

The perception of single letters is a critical component of reading, as evidenced by deficits in letter perception in individuals with dyslexia. Thus, visual letter recognition is a type of perceptual expertise, but it differs from face-like perceptual expertise in several important ways based on different perceptual and task demands. For example,...

(0.33 MB DOC)

Experience can alter how objects are represented in the visual cortex. But experience can take different forms. It is unknown whether the kind of visual experience systematically alters the nature of visual cortical object representations. We take advantage of different training regimens found to produce qualitatively different types of perceptual...

Compared with other objects, faces are processed more holistically and with a larger reliance on configural information. Such hallmarks of face processing can also be found for nonface objects as people develop expertise with them. Is this specifically a result of expertise individuating objects, or would any type of prolonged intensive experience...

Perceptual categorization at the basic level is generally faster than categorization at more superordinate or subordinate level [Rosch, E., Mervis, C. B., Gray, W. D., Johnson, D. M., & Boyes-Braem, P. (1976). Basic objects in natural categories. Cognitive Psychology, 8(3), 382-439]. But, what does it mean to be fastest? One possibility is that lev...

Holistic processing of faces can be measured as a failure of selective attention to one face-half under instructions to ignore the other face-half in a naming or same/different matching task. But is interference from the irrelevant half due to response interference rather than to holistic processing? Here, participants learned to name two faces "Fr...

Parts of the left ventral visual pathway are engaged selectively during the perception of words, letter strings, and even single letters. While studies have shown overlap between activations for letters and characters across writing systems, they adopted group analyses with very limited spatial resolution, or used words and letter strings that have...

While there has been increasing effort in dissociating the neural substrates recruited by perception of different objects, the theoretical and behavioural work needed to understand such dissociation lags behind. In an attempt to compare expertise in letter and face perception, we outline a theoretical framework that characterizes different types of...

Font tuning (FT) occurs when observers recognize a sequence of letters presented in the same font faster than in different fonts (Sanocki 1987, 1988 Journal of Experimental Psychology. Human Perception and Performance 13 267-278; 14 472-480). Here, we test the hypothesis that FT is associated with expertise with a specific writing system. We develo...

One would expect that a lifetime of experience recognizing letters would have an important influence on the visual system. Surprisingly, there is limited evidence of a specific neural response to letters over visual control stimuli. We measured brain activation during a sequential matching task using isolated characters (Roman letters, digits, and...

Expertise with print is likely to optimize visual processes for recognizing characters of a familiar writing system. Although brain activations have been identified for words and letter strings in contrast with other stimuli, relatively little work has focused on the neural basis of single-letter perception. English readers and Chinese-English bili...

Previous studies of object recognition have shown efficient recognition of silhouettes, suggesting that much of the information used to recognize objects resides in the outline. These studies, however, have used objects that contain many components, which provide redundant information. In this study, we examined recognition of silhouettes of less-c...

The use of multiple familiar views of objects to facilitate recognition of novel views has been addressed in a number of behavioral studies, but the results have not been conclusive. The present study was a comprehensive examination of view combination for different types of novel views (internal or external to the studied views) and different obje...

Dog experts, ornithologists, radiologists and other specialists are noted for their remarkable abilities at categorizing, identifying and recognizing objects within their domain of expertise. A complete understanding of the development of perceptual expertise requires a combination of thorough empirical research and carefully articulated computatio...