The Effects of Perspective-Taking on Perceptual Learning

Abstract

Research in perceptual psychology and anthropology has demonstrated that experts will literally see objects and events in their domain differently than non-experts. Experts can make distinctions and notice subtleties that a novice does not perceive. Experts also have strategies for looking at data and artifacts in a domain; they know where to look so that they can answer the important questions. An expert perspective can be described as the ways of seeing and experiencing phenomena that are influenced by the specialized knowledge that an expert has. The present paper will survey the existing literature on perspective-taking and learning, with a short discussion at the end of some of the ways that existing technologies have been used to support the sharing of perspectives. Of particular interest in this paper is the potential to use new media technologies to convey the perspective of someone with specialized knowledge or insider information on an important event—a viewpoint that could be termed an "expert perspective."