Mid-Level Perceptual Features Distinguish Objects of Different Real-World Sizes
Mid-Level Perceptual Features Distinguish Objects of Different Real-World Sizes
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DOI：
10.1037/xge0000130
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发表时间：
2016-01-01
影响因子：
4.1
通讯作者：
Alvarez, George A.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Long, Bria;Konkle, Talia;Alvarez, George A.
理解知觉表征和概念表征是如何联系在一起的是认知科学的一个基本目标。在这里，我们关注一个广泛的概念区别，它限制了我们与对象交互的方式--真实世界的大小。尽管基本类别似乎有明显的知觉关联(苹果看起来像其他苹果，橙子看起来像其他橙子)，但更广泛的类别区别的知觉关联在很大程度上是未被探索的，即，小物体看起来像其他小物体吗？因为有许多种小物体(例如，杯子、钥匙)，所以可能没有可靠的感知特征来将它们与大物体(例如，汽车、桌子)区分开来。与这种直觉相反，我们证明了大小物体都有可靠的感知差异，可以通过视觉处理的早期阶段提取出来。在一系列视觉搜索研究中，当分心物体在现实世界中的大小不同时，参与者发现目标物体的速度更快。当我们对大小物体进行广泛采样时，当我们控制低级别特征和图像统计数据时，当我们将物体简化为纹理形式时，这些结果是成立的--纹理形式是松散地保持物体形状的不可识别的纹理。然而，当我们使用更基本的纹理时，这种效果就不存在了。这些结果表明，大小物体具有可靠的不同的中层知觉特征，并表明关于大类别成员的早期知觉信息可能影响下游物体的感知、识别和分类过程。
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.