Musical expertise modulates the effects of visual perceptual load

Several studies have demonstrated that faces are processed differently from other types of objects, implicating a special role that faces have within the human visual system. However, other studies have suggested that faces may be special only in that they constitute a highly familiar category of visual objects with which most humans have expertise. In this study, we tested a group of expert musicians with a musical instrument classification task during which irrelevant images of musical instruments were presented as visual distractors under varying conditions of perceptual load. Unlike nonmusicians (who had been tested in Lavie, Ro, & Russell, 2003, using the same paradigm as in the present study), the musicians processed these irrelevant images of musical instruments even under conditions of high perceptual load. These results suggest that musical instruments are processed automatically and without capacity limits in subjects with musical expertise and implicate a specialized processing mechanism for objects of high familiarity.