Medical Xpress examines new ways we can train our minds to use “holistic processing” – that is, we can teach our eyes not to miss the details we normally don’t see:
The new article was inspired by two recent studies on holistic processing that found opposite results. One study, by Alan Wong, Tom Palmeri and Gauthier, found that it was possible to train people so they were experts in recognizing made-up objects called Greebles. As you’d expect, once they were experts in looking at these strange objects, they processed them holistically, like a face. But a study by found the opposite: novices process Chinese characters holistically, while experts don’t. “That’s a paradox,” Gauthier says.
To explain this paradox, Gauthier and her colleagues tested people in another area of expertise: music. Specifically, they tested how people look at written music. Through several studies, they found that both experts and novices seemed to use holistic processing, but they did it for different reasons. For people who didn’t know how to read music, it was strategic. “It seemed to be a way for people to try to do the best they could—they were trying to look at the whole thing,” she says. Experts, on the other hand, seemed to grasp a whole section of music at once.