Radiologists detect novel patterns better than novices

What is it about?

Radiologists are trained to detect anomalies in medical images. Does their perceptual experience give them an edge when detecting patterns they are not familiar with? In other words, do the perceptual skills acquired in diagnostic medical imaging generalize to untrained perceptual judgements?

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Why is it important?

Expertise in visual object recognition is thought to be domain-specific, i.e., specific to the trained tasks, stimuli and context. This work provides an instance of generalization of perceptual expertise beyond the trained domain - here, beyond the domain of diagnostic medical imaging.