Biederman I, Cooper E E
Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 55455.
Cogn Psychol. 1991 Jul;23(3):393-419. doi: 10.1016/0010-0285(91)90014-f.
The speed and accuracy of perceptual recognition of a briefly presented picture of an object is facilitated by its prior presentation. Picture priming tasks were used to assess whether the facilitation is a function of the repetition of: (a) the object's image features (viz., vertices and edges), (b) the object model (e.g., that it is a grand piano), or (c) a representation intermediate between (a) and (b) consisting of convex or singly concave components of the object, roughly corresponding to the object's parts. Subjects viewed pictures with half their contour removed by deleting either (a) every other image feature from each part, or (b) half the components. On a second (primed) block of trials, subjects saw: (a) the identical image that they viewed on the first block, (b) the complement which had the missing contours, or (c) a same name-different exemplar of the object class (e.g., a grand piano when an upright piano had been shown on the first block). With deletion of features, speed and accuracy of naming identical and complementary images were equivalent, indicating that none of the priming could be attributed to the features actually present in the image. Performance with both types of image enjoyed an advantage over that with the different exemplars, establishing that the priming was visual rather than verbal or conceptual. With deletion of the components, performance with identical images was much better than that with their complements. The latter were equivalent to the different exemplars, indicating that all the visual priming of an image of an object is through the activation of a representation of its components in specified relations. In terms of a recent neural net implementation of object recognition (Hummel & Biederman, in press), the results suggest that the locus of object priming may be at changes in the weight matrix for a geon assembly layer, where units have self-organized to represent combinations of convex or singly concave components (or geons) and their attributes (e.g., aspect ratio, orientation, and relations with other geons such as TOP-OF). The results of these experiments provide evidence for the psychological reality of intermediate representations in real-time visual object recognition.
物体的先前呈现有助于对其简短呈现图片的感知识别速度和准确性。图片启动任务用于评估这种促进作用是否是以下重复的函数：(a) 物体的图像特征（即顶点和边缘），(b) 物体模型（例如它是一架三角钢琴），或 (c) (a) 和 (b) 之间的一种中间表征，由物体的凸或单凹组件组成，大致对应于物体的部分。通过删除 (a) 每个部分的每隔一个图像特征，或 (b) 一半的组件，使受试者观看轮廓被去除一半的图片。在第二个（启动）试验块中，受试者看到：(a) 他们在第一个试验块中看到的相同图像，(b) 具有缺失轮廓的互补图像，或 (c) 物体类别的同名不同示例（例如，当在第一个试验块中展示了立式钢琴时，展示一架三角钢琴）。随着特征的删除，命名相同和互补图像的速度和准确性是等效的，这表明启动作用都不能归因于图像中实际存在的特征。两种类型图像的表现都比不同示例的表现具有优势，这表明启动作用是视觉的而非言语或概念的。随着组件的删除，相同图像的表现比其互补图像的表现要好得多。后者与不同示例等效，这表明物体图像的所有视觉启动作用都是通过激活其组件在特定关系中的表征来实现的。根据最近物体识别的神经网络实现（Hummel & Biederman，即将出版），结果表明物体启动的位置可能在于geon组装层的权重矩阵变化，在该层中单元已自组织以表示凸或单凹组件（或geon）及其属性（例如长宽比、方向以及与其他geon的关系，如顶部）的组合。这些实验的结果为实时视觉物体识别中中间表征的心理现实提供了证据。
