Expert Eyes Cultivation
topic
Expert eyes cultivation is the deliberate development of the perceptual expertise of a domain through sufficient exposure to develop the pattern recognition that enables expert perception — the wine expert's capacity to perceive flavor compounds that the novice cannot distinguish, the experienced clinician's capacity to perceive diagnostic features that the medical student misses, and the accomplished musician's capacity to perceive harmonic and rhythmic structure that the untrained listener hears as undifferentiated sound.
Role
Expert perception is domain-specific creative perception — the enhancement of the perceptual categories available for noticing within a specific domain through the accumulation of perceptual experience that develops increasingly fine-grained discrimination. The creative value of expert perception cultivation across multiple domains is that each domain's perceptual expertise provides a distinct set of features to notice — with the person who has developed expert perception in both music and biology noticing both the compositional structure and the ecological dynamics of the same soundscape, making connections between what they notice that neither musical nor biological expertise alone would produce.