Time course of object identification: evidence for a global-to-local contingency.

A time course contingency is the modification of later phases of object recognition contingent upon stimulus information extracted earlier in processing. It can increase the efficiency of later processing and reduce computational burdens. This idea was instantiated within a global-to-local model and supported in 4 integration priming experiments, in which primes and target objects were presented briefly and then masked. In Experiment 1-3, global and coarse-grained common-feature primes presented early in processing facilitated discriminations between similarly shaped objects, even though they provided no discrimination-relevant information. In Experiment 4, global primes were more effective than local primes early in processing, whereas local primes were more effective than global primes late in processing.