Navon’s classical paradigm concerning local and global processing relates systematically to visual object classification performance

Abstract

Forty years ago David Navon tried to tackle a central problem in psychology concerning the time course of perceptual processing: Do we first see the details (local level) followed by the overall outlay (global level) or is it rather the other way around? He did this by developing a now classical paradigm involving the presentation of compound stimuli; large letters composed of smaller letters. Despite the usefulness of this paradigm it remains uncertain whether effects found with compound stimuli relate directly to visual object recognition. It does so because compound stimuli are not actual objects but rather formations of elements and because the elements that form the global shape of compound stimuli are not features of the global shape but rather objects in their own right. To examine the relationship between performance on Navon’s paradigm and visual object processing we derived two indexes from Navon’s paradigm that reflect different aspects of the relationship between global and local processing. We find that individual differences on these indexes can explain a considerable amount of variance in two standard object classification paradigms; object decision and superordinate categorization, suggesting that Navon’s paradigm does relate to visual object processing.

Global precedence effects account for individual differences in both face and object recognition performance

“…In line with our previous study (Gerlach & Poirel, 2018), we find a negative correlation between RTs in the object recognition task (object decision) and our index of global precedence derived from Navon's paradigm (the Global-Local precedence index). The larger the global precedence effect, the more efficient the object recognition performance.…”

“…Even though compound stimuli differ from common objects in important aspects (cf. the introduction), we have recently shown that individual differences in the magnitude of the global precedence effect in Navon's paradigm can explain a considerable amount of variance in normal object classification performance (Gerlach & Poirel, 2018). In the present experiments we examined if global precedence effects can also explain individual differences in face recognition performance, and if so, whether the amount of variance accounted for by global precedence effects is similar for face and object recognition performance.…”

“…This aspect is not trivial considering that compound stimuli differ from common objects in that they are formations of elements, rather than actual objects, and that the elements that constitute their global shape are not features of the global shape but objects in their own right. In more direct support of the notion that the global precedence effect may tap operations underlying visual object recognition, we recently showedby means of an individual difference approachthat global precedence effects in Navon's paradigm can explain a considerable amount of variance in two standard object classification paradigms: object decision and superordinate categorization (Gerlach & Poirel, 2018).…”

“…The higher the score on this index, the faster are responses to global as compared with local shape characteristics. This index is also the same as that used in the study by Gerlach et al (2017), which showed a correlation with face recognition performance in DP, and in the study by Gerlach and Poirel (2018), which showed a correlation with object classification performance.…”

How the forest interacts with the trees: Multiscale shape integration explains global and local processing

“…Global and local processing are thought to be localized to the right and left hemispheres 29 respectively (Fink et al, 1996;Han et al, 2002Han et al, , 2004, and are mediated by brain 30 oscillations at different frequencies (Romei et al, 2011;Liu and Luo, 2019). These 31 phenomena have now been observed in a variety of other animals, especially during tasks 32 that require speeded responses (Tanaka and differences in global/local processing predict other aspects of object perception (Gerlach 38 and Poirel, 2018;Gerlach and Starrfelt, 2018). 39 for incongruent but not congruent stimuli.…”