Differences in perception, understanding, and responsiveness of product design between experts and students: an early event-related potentials study

This study compares the experts and the novices to investigate their information processing in dealing with the different degrees of recognition of shape-match stimulus by measuring the event-related potentials (ERPs). ERPs were recorded while 20 designers and 20 novices made shape-match judgments for table and chair sets. All of the tables were in the normal style, and the chairs had different components and structures, including NormalChair, AllbyChair, and NonebyChair. The results show that the experts had fewer agreements than the novices did in matching the Normal table to the NormalChair used in the experiment. Furthermore, the experts’ ERPs elicited by AllbyChair and NonebyChair conditions had higher N170 amplitudes than those of the novices. However, the novices, in response to these AllbyChair and NonebyChair conditions for N170 exhibited greater delay latency than the experts. Additionally, the design expertise effects in object recognition provided additional evidence and confirmed similar results from many previous N170 studies. The experts comprehended the content in their familiar field, and inferred the complex design structure to the abstract level to show the hierarchical association of the knowledge structure. However, novices could not clearly understand the different and varied structures, and could only speculate from the limited information presented in existing problems. This study infers that because they used visual thinking in their training, the designers showed stronger expert performances, and were more capable than ordinary people in recognizing novel objects from bizarre entity arrangements as familiar ones.