Isabel Gauthier
Vanderbilt University
“Individual Differences in Domain-general Object Recognition”
Research in visual object recognition has largely focused on mechanisms common to most people, but there is increased interest in individual differences. This talk will summarize recent work on domain-general object recognition, offering support for a general ability we call o, which accounts for performance in a range of visual tasks and object categories, both familiar and novel. We found this ability is highly stable based on a one month test-retest, that it is distinct from general intelligence, perceptual speed, low-level vision and personality constructs. Across several studies, we found that o accounts for object recognition not only in the visual domain, but also in haptic and auditory tasks. We have measured associations between o and a neurometricallysensitive measure of visual sensitivity to shape and found distributed neural correlates in ventral occipital cortex. I will demonstrate how o can contribute to a better understanding of individual differences in specific domains. For instance, we found that o accounts for even more variance than fluid intelligence when predicting how to recognize chest x-ray tumors. Using o to control for domain-general abilities led to the discovery of two domain-specific abilities to recognize food, only one of which depends on color. Still a nascent field of research, the study of domain-general object recognition opens a window into traditionally ignored differences between people, which are independent of those differences society most emphasizes. Its understanding has wide-ranging theoretical and applied implications