We repeatedly find that car recognition is independent from the recognition of other object categories, so the category seems to be special. We want to see if this independence is modulated by experience perceiving cars (similar to what has been found for face recognition in Balas & Saville, 2015). To test this, we will determine if cars are less independent from other object categories in a population living in a small town than a larger town. Since people from small towns likely have less experience perceiving cars, we predict that their car recognition ability will be less “specialized” than for people from larger cities. We are collaborating with researchers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to conduct experiments testing this hypothesis.
This work is supported by a NSF fellowship to Mackenzie Sunday.
Collaboration with Mike Dodd at University of Nebraska.