Life experiences shape how we see and understand the world around us. Our team at Baycrest Hospital and the University of Toronto studies the neuroscience of learning. We focus specifically on understanding how prior knowledge and experience influence the way we process new information.
One particularly fun way to study these questions is to work with groups that have specialized knowledge. Past work on expertise covers a wide range of topics. There have been studies in chess players,1,2 musicians,3,4 taxi drivers,5 Pokemon aficionados, 6 radiologists,7 car enthusiasts,8 and many other groups. Studies on expertise reveal how substantial experience in a specific area can lead to changes in both the brain’s structure and its functions. These findings offer a window into the broader concept of neuroplasticity— the brain’s capacity to change and reorganize.
Collectively, this research indicates that learning about the natural world may be a particularly effective way of promoting cognitive and mental health.
1. Gobet, F., and Charness, N. (2006).“Expertise in chess,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, eds K. A. Ericsson, N. Charness, P. Feltovich, and R. R. Hoffman (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), 523–538. doi: 10.1017/CBO9780511816796.038
2. Leone MJ, Fernandez Slezak D, Cecchi GA, Sigman M. The geometry of expertise. Front Psychol. 2014 Feb 4;5:47. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00047.
3. Bermudez, P., Lerch, J. P., Evans, A. C., & Zatorre, R. J. (2009). Neuroanatomical correlates of musicianship as revealed by cortical thickness and voxel-based morphometry. Cerebral cortex, 19(7), 1583-1596.
4. Chang, Y. (2014). Reorganization and plastic changes of the human brain associated with skill learning and expertise. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 8, 35.
5. Griesbauer, E. M., Manley, E., Wiener, J. M., & Spiers, H. J. (2022). London taxi drivers: A review of neurocognitive studies and an exploration of how they build their cognitive map of London. Hippocampus, 32(1), 3-20.
6. Xie, W., & Zhang, W. (2018). Familiarity speeds up visual short-term memory consolidation: Electrophysiological evidence from contralateral delay activities. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 30(1), 1-13.
7. Evans, K. K., Georgian-Smith, D., Tambouret, R., Birdwell, R. L., & Wolfe, J. M. (2013). The gist of the abnormal: Above-chance medical decision making in the blink of an eye. Psychonomic bulletin & review, 20, 1170-1175.
8. Ross, D. A., Tamber-Rosenau, B. J., Palmeri, T. J., Zhang, J., Xu, Y., & Gauthier, I. (2018). High-resolution functional magnetic resonance imaging reveals configural processing of cars in right anterior fusiform face area of car experts. Journal of cognitive neuroscience, 30(7), 973-984.
9. Annis, J., & Palmeri, T. J. (2019). Modeling memory dynamics in visual expertise. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 45(9), 1599.
10. Duyck, S., Martens, F., Chen, C. Y., & Op de Beeck, H. (2021). How visual expertise changes representational geometry: A behavioral and neural perspective. Journal of cognitive neuroscience, 33(12), 2461-2476.
11. Hagen, S., & Tanaka, J. W. (2019). Examining the neural correlates of within-category discrimination in face and non-face expert recognition. Neuropsychologia, 124, 44-54.
12. Wing, E. A., Burles, F., Ryan, J. D., & Gilboa, A. (2022). The structure of prior knowledge enhances memory in experts by reducing interference. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(26), e2204172119.
13. Ewert, A., & Chang, Y. (2018). Levels of nature and stress response. Behavioral Sciences, 8(5), 49.
14. Hammoud, R., Tognin, S., Burgess, L., Bergou, N., Smythe, M., Gibbons, J., … & Mechelli, A. (2022). Smartphone-based ecological momentary assessment reveals mental health benefits of birdlife. Scientific reports, 12(1), 17589
15. Kühn, S., Forlim, C. G., Lender, A., Wirtz, J., & Gallinat, J. (2021). Brain functional connectivity differs when viewing pictures from natural and built environments using fMRI resting state analysis. Scientific reports, 11(1), 4110.
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