Visual object categorisation at distinct levels of abstraction: a new stimulus set.
We designed a new stimulus set with 269 line drawings of everyday artifacts and animals. The stimulus set contains several typical exemplars from a sample of 25 basic-level categories. We determined to what extent these stimuli were named at the basic level and at a more subordinate level. An additional experiment showed the validity of this calibration: typicality ratings were correlated significantly with the level of naming. In a final experiment we found that this effect depends largely on the global configuration of a stimulus as it was still apparent with degraded images obtained by locally shifting small fragments of the drawings.
Op de Beeck
H
H
University of Leuven, Department of Psychology, Belgium.
Wagemans
J
J
D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D005556:Form Perception / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D009275:Names; D015588:Observer Variation; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results