Visual object detection, categorization, and identification tasks are associated with different time courses and sensitivities.

Abstract

Recent evidence suggests that the recognition of an object's presence and its explicit recognition are temporally closely related. Here we re-examined the time course (using a fine and a coarse temporal resolution) and the sensitivity of three possible component processes of visual object recognition. In particular, participants saw briefly presented (Experiment I to III) or noise masked (Experiment IV) static images of objects and non-object textures. Participants reported the presence of an object, its basic level category, and its subordinate category while we measured recognition performance by means of accuracy and reaction times. All three recognition tasks were clearly separable in terms of their time course and sensitivity. Finally, the use of a coarser temporal sampling of presentation times decreased performance differences between the detection and basic level categorization task suggesting that a fine temporal sampling for the dissociation of recognition performances is important. Overall the three probed recognition processes were associated with different time courses and sensitivities.

Visual categorization of social interactions

“…Moreover, images within each cluster were perceived as highly similar as suggested by very small ESS values. The second level clusters seems to correspond to basic object levels as their composition and naming is in line with previous reports of basic object levels (Mack et al, 2008;Mack & Palmeri, 2011;de la Rosa et al, 2011). Moreover, second level object recognition is associated with a clear recognition advantage over first level cluster recognition.…”

“…These results suggest that recognition of objects at the second cluster level is faster than at the first level and that this difference depends on presentation time. Because the first and second level clusters in the present study are akin to previously basic and sub-ordinate objects levels, the results replicate previous findings suggesting that object recognition is faster at the basic level than at the sub-ordinate level (e.g., de la Rosa et al, 2011).…”

“…Finally, the labels "hockey," "soccer," "arguing," "fight," "waving," "shaking hands," "rescue," "begging," "kiss," "hug" were the answer options in the sub-ordinate social interaction recognition task. We have previously shown probing visual recognition in this way provides similar results to one-intervalforced choice tasks, which are run for each recognition task separately (de la Rosa et al, 2011).…”

“…We used an experimental procedure identical to Experiment 1 reported in the study of de la Rosa and colleagues (de la Rosa et al, 2011). This procedure probes the degree of recognition of a briefly glimpsed stimulus.…”

“…The selection of social interaction types was based on pilot studies using a large set of social interaction images that were grouped by other participants. The choice of object types was guided by previous reports of sub-ordinate object levels that form a basic object level (Grill-Spector & Kanwisher, 2005;de la Rosa, Choudhery, & Chatziastros, 2011).…”