Long Bria, Konkle Talia, Cohen Michael A, Alvarez George A
Department of Psychology, Harvard University.
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
J Exp Psychol Gen. 2016 Jan;145(1):95-109. doi: 10.1037/xge0000130.
Understanding how perceptual and conceptual representations are connected is a fundamental goal of cognitive science. Here, we focus on a broad conceptual distinction that constrains how we interact with objects--real-world size. Although there appear to be clear perceptual correlates for basic-level categories (apples look like other apples, oranges look like other oranges), the perceptual correlates of broader categorical distinctions are largely unexplored, i.e., do small objects look like other small objects? Because there are many kinds of small objects (e.g., cups, keys), there may be no reliable perceptual features that distinguish them from big objects (e.g., cars, tables). Contrary to this intuition, we demonstrated that big and small objects have reliable perceptual differences that can be extracted by early stages of visual processing. In a series of visual search studies, participants found target objects faster when the distractor objects differed in real-world size. These results held when we broadly sampled big and small objects, when we controlled for low-level features and image statistics, and when we reduced objects to texforms--unrecognizable textures that loosely preserve an object's form. However, this effect was absent when we used more basic textures. These results demonstrate that big and small objects have reliably different mid-level perceptual features, and suggest that early perceptual information about broad-category membership may influence downstream object perception, recognition, and categorization processes.
理解感知表征与概念表征如何相互关联是认知科学的一个基本目标。在此，我们关注一个广泛的概念区分，它限制了我们与物体交互的方式——现实世界中的大小。虽然基本层次类别似乎有明确的感知关联（苹果看起来像其他苹果，橙子看起来像其他橙子），但更广泛类别区分的感知关联在很大程度上尚未得到探索，即小物体看起来像其他小物体吗？因为有许多种类的小物体（如杯子、钥匙），可能没有可靠的感知特征将它们与大物体（如汽车、桌子）区分开来。与这种直觉相反，我们证明了大物体和小物体具有可靠的感知差异，这些差异可以在视觉处理的早期阶段被提取出来。在一系列视觉搜索研究中，当干扰物体在现实世界大小上不同时，参与者能更快地找到目标物体。当我们广泛采样大物体和小物体时、控制低级特征和图像统计时以及将物体简化为纹理形式（大致保留物体形状但无法识别的纹理）时，这些结果都成立。然而，当我们使用更基本的纹理时，这种效应就不存在了。这些结果表明，大物体和小物体具有可靠的不同中级感知特征，并表明关于宽泛类别成员的早期感知信息可能会影响下游的物体感知、识别和分类过程。
