Studies in the psychology of visual expertise have tended to focus on a limited set of expert domains, such as radiology and athletics. Conclusions drawn from these data indicate that experts use parafoveal vision to process images holistically. In this study, we examined a novel, as-of-yet-unstudied class of visual experts—architects—expecting similar results. However, the results indicate that architects, though visual experts, may not employ the holistic processing strategy observed in their previously studied counterparts. Participants (n = 48, 24 architects, 24 naïve) were asked to find targets in chest radiographs and perspective images. All images were presented in both gaze-contingent and normal viewing conditions. Consistent with a holistic processing model, we expected two results: (1) architects would display a greater difference in saccadic amplitude between the gaze-contingent and normal conditions, and (2) architects would spend less time per search than an undergraduate control group. We found that the architects were more accurate in the perspectival task, but they took more time and displayed a lower difference in saccadic amplitude than the controls. Our research indicates a disjunctive conclusion. Either architects are simply different kinds of visual experts than those previously studied, or we have generated a task that employs visual expertise without holistic processing. Our data suggest a healthy skepticism for across-the-board inferences collected from a single domain of expertise to the nature of visual expertise generally. More work is needed to determine whether holism is a feature of all visual expertise.

视觉专业心理学的研究倾向于集中在有限的专家领域，例如放射学和运动学。从这些数据得出的结论表明，专家们使用中央凹视力来整体处理图像。在这项研究中，我们研究了一种新颖的，尚未研究的视觉专家类（建筑师），预期的结果相似。但是，结果表明，尽管是视觉专家，建筑师也可能不采用先前研究的同行所观察到的整体处理策略。参加人数= 48位，24位建筑师，24位天真的）被要求在胸部X光片和透视图中找到目标。所有图像均在视线和正常观看条件下显示。与整体处理模型一致，我们预期会有两个结果：（1）建筑师在视线和正常情况之间的扫视幅度上显示出更大的差异；（2）建筑师每次搜索所花费的时间少于大学生对照组。我们发现，建筑师在透视任务上更为准确，但与对照相比，他们花费了更多的时间并且在acc声振幅上显示出更低的差异。我们的研究表明了一个分离的结论。建筑师与先前研究的视觉专家完全不同，或者我们已经产生了一项任务，该任务需要视觉专业知识而无需整体处理。我们的数据表明，对于从单一专业知识领域收集的全面推论对视觉专业知识的本质，人们持健康的怀疑态度。要确定整体性是否是所有视觉专业知识的特征，还需要做更多的工作。