Holistic processing—the tendency to perceive objects as indecomposable wholes—has long been viewed as a process specific to faces or objects of expertise. Although current theories differ in what causes holistic processing, they share a fundamental constraint for its generalization: Nonface objects cannot elicit facelike holistic processing in the absence of expertise. Contrary to this prevaili...

Whereas much early work in artificial intelligence was devoted to the search for a single, powerful, domain-independent problem-solving methodology [e.g., GPS (Newell and Simon, 1972)], subsequent efforts have stressed the use of large stores of domain-specific knowledge as a basis for high performance. The knowledge base for this sort of program [e.g., DENDRAL (Feigenbaum et al., 1971), MACSYM...