Department of Psychology, Harvard University, United States.
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, United States.
Cognition. 2017 Nov;168:234-242. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2017.06.025. Epub 2017 Jul 18.
When we view a picture of an object, we automatically recognize what the object is and know how big it typically is in the world (Konkle & Oliva, 2012). Is information about an object's size activated only after we've identified the object, or can this size information be activated before object recognition even occurs? We previously found that big and small objects differ in mid-level perceptual features (Long, Konkle, Cohen, & Alvarez, 2016). Here we asked whether these perceptual features can automatically trigger real-world size processing, bypassing the need for basic-level object recognition. To test this hypothesis, we used an image synthesis algorithm to generate "texform" images, which are unrecognizable versions of big and small objects that still preserve some textural and form information from the original images. Across two experiments, we find that even though these synthesized stimuli cannot be identified, they automatically trigger familiar size processing and give rise to a Size-Stroop effect. Furthermore, we isolate perceived curvature as one feature the visual system uses to infer real-world size. These results suggest that mid-level perceptual features can automatically feed forward to facilitate object processing, and challenge the idea that we must first identify an object before we can access its higher-level properties.
当我们看到一个物体的图片时，我们会自动识别出这个物体是什么，并且知道它在现实世界中的典型大小（Konkle & Oliva，2012）。物体大小的信息是在我们识别出物体之后才被激活的，还是在我们甚至还没有识别出物体之前就已经被激活了？我们之前发现，大和小的物体在中等级别上的感知特征有所不同（Long、Konkle、Cohen 和 Alvarez，2016）。在这里，我们想知道这些感知特征是否可以自动触发对真实世界大小的处理，从而绕过对基本级别物体识别的需求。为了检验这个假设，我们使用了一种图像合成算法来生成“texform”图像，这些图像是大物体和小物体的不可识别版本，但仍保留了原始图像的一些纹理和形状信息。在两个实验中，我们发现，即使这些合成的刺激无法被识别，它们也会自动触发熟悉的大小处理，并产生大小斯特鲁普效应。此外，我们将感知曲率分离出来，作为视觉系统用来推断真实世界大小的一个特征。这些结果表明，中等级别感知特征可以自动向前传递，从而促进物体处理，这挑战了我们必须先识别出物体才能获取其高级属性的观点。
