Role of Knowledge in Motion Extrapolation: The Relevance of an Approach Contrasting Experts and Novices

One of the most powerful adaptive mechanisms available to the visuocognitive system for avoiding localization errors is to anticipate the probable evolution of the dynamic event as the environmental scenes are being perceived. For about 30 years now, this phenomenon has been studied in psychology in a field named ``representational momentum'' (RM). AM refers to the tendency of participants to ``remember'' the stopping point of an event as being farther along in the direction of movement than it was in reality. In this chapter, we will focus on one aspect of this phenomenon: the role of knowledge present in memory. First, we will show that different forms of knowledge are likely to influence RM effect. Second, we will focus on one specific form of knowledge: expert knowledge. We will present studies using an expert novice paradigm providing insight with regard to the mechanisms involved in RM effect. These studies notably show that RM effect is partly a ``domain-specific'' phenomenon, involving knowledge specific to each category of scenes and objects.