Integration of physical and semantic information in object processing.
Physiological studies report independent processing pathways for form and colour information. A more-complex picture on human subjects has previously been reported. A sequential matching task was used that was based on a physical property of an object and in which semantic relations between stimuli were manipulated. Performance was affected by semantic information when matching was based on a property of the form of an object (its orientation, shape, or size). Effects of semantic information were eliminated when matching was based on the colour of a local part of an object but were found again when subjects matched pictures on the basis of the percentage of a colour integrated across the shape boundary. The results suggest independent selection mechanisms in vision in which selection by local colour can be based on inhibition of the form-processing pathway whilst processing of the global configuration of the form of an object activates automatically the identification process.
Boucart
M
M
Hôpital Civil de Strasbourg, INSERM (U405), Département de Psychiatrie, France. boucart@alsace.u-strasbg.fr
Humphreys
G W
GW
D003071:Cognition; D003118:Color Perception / Q000502:physiology; D005556:Form Perception / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D011581:Psychological Tests; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*