Role of line junctions in expert object recognition: The case of musical notation

Line junctions are well-known to be important for real-world object recognition, and sensitivity to line junctions is enhanced with perceptual experience with an object category. However, it remains unclear whether these very simple visual features are involved in expert object representations at the neural level, and if yes, at what level(s) they are involved. In this EEG study, 31 music reading experts and 31 novices performed a one-back task with intact musical notation, musical notation with line junctions removed and pseudo-letters. We observed more separable neural representations of musical notation from pseudo-letter for experts than for novices when line junctions were present and during 180-280 ms after stimulus onset. Also, the presence of line junctions was better decoded in experts than in novices during 320-580 ms, and the decoding accuracy in this time window predicted the behavioral recognition advantage of musical notation when line junctions were present. These suggest that, with perceptual expertise, line junctions are more involved in category selective representation of objects, and are more explicitly represented in later stages of processing to support expert recognition performance.