I've come across a few experiments that sought to compare qroups of different age on their rating of an aesthetic effect.  A control rating of lightness of gray scale patches was used to see whether the groups differed in their understanding of doing ratings.  Under normal viewing conditions, there is little reason to believe that typical persons of various age, gender, or culture differ in their perception of gray..  The researchers found little difference in the gray scale data and argued that this supported their conclusion that diffference between groups in their experiment was not attributable to a difference in their use of ratings.  

There have been many related studies in the visual system.....see e.g.

You should look at the Monte Carl simulations in Wichmann, Felix A., and N. Jeremy Hill. "The psychometric function: I. Fitting, sampling, and goodness of fit." Perception & psychophysics 63.8 (2001): 1293-1313. Particularly pages 1307-1309.

You might also look at Emily D. Grossman, Randolph Blake, and Chai-Youn Kim who documented a clear change in d’ (and brain activity) with practice in detecting biological motion….

Learning to See Biological Motion: Brain Activity Parallels Behavior Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2004, Vol. 16 , 1669-1679

Also see  for changes with practice in texture discrimination Karni, Avi, and Dov Sagi. "Where practice makes perfect in texture discrimination: evidence for primary visual cortex plasticity." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 88.11 (1991): 4966-4970. and  Kami, Avi, and D. Sagi. "The time course of learning a visual skill." Nature 365.6443 (1993): 250-252.

Hi, thanks for all.the answers. @Napoleon: I need this model to assess the capabilities  of different psychometric methods. These are the specimen, peformance measures are the results and the model of the observer is used as a mere tool in this case... Best regards, ch

Hi everyone,

just a short follow up (took a while because of other stuff on the table...):  I find two variants for the modeling of experience d observers from the reported literature:

- Experienced observes exhibit a lower threshold, but assuably no change in slope of the psychometric function (Karni /Sagi, 1991, also Wichmann/Hill2001)

- Learning a certain task will increase d' of the observer (Grossmann, Blake and Kim, 2004)

Thanks everyone for your help. Best regards, ch

This paper might help.

Article Comparison of naïve and expert subjects in the assessment of...

Kwame, thanks a lot!