Specific visual expertise reduces susceptibility to visual illusions

Wincza, Radoslaw, Hartley, Calum, Donovan, Tim ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4112-861X , Linkenauger, Sally, Crawford, Trevor, Griffiths, Debra and Doherty, Martin (2025) Specific visual expertise reduces susceptibility to visual illusions. Scientific Reports, 15 . p. 5948.

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Abstract

Extensive exposure to specific kinds of imagery tunes visual perception, enhancing recognition and interpretation abilities relevant to those stimuli (e.g. radiologists can rapidly extract important information from medical scans). For the first time, we tested whether specific visual expertise induced by professional training also affords domain-general perceptual advantages. Experts in medical image interpretation (n = 44; reporting radiographers, trainee radiologists, and certified radiologists) and a control group consisting of psychology and medical students (n = 107) responded to the Ebbinghaus, Ponzo, Müller-Lyer, and Shepard Tabletops visual illusions in forced-choice tasks. Our results show that medical image experts were significantly less susceptible to all illusions except for the Shepard Tabletops, demonstrating superior perceptual accuracy. These findings could possibly be attributed to a stronger local processing bias, a by-product of learning to focus on specific areas of interest by disregarding irrelevant context in their domain of expertise.

Item Type:	Article
Journal / Publication Title:	Scientific Reports
Publisher:	Nature Research
ISSN:	2045-2322
Departments:	Institute of Health > Medical Sciences
Additional Information:	Tim Donovan, Associate Professor - Medical Image Perception and Cognition, University of Cumbria, UK. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made.
Depositing User:	Tim Donovan
Date Deposited:	18 Mar 2025 11:38
Last Modified:	18 Mar 2025 12:00
URI:	https://insight.cumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/8710

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