title: Familiarity does not aid access to features.
abstract: Previous findings have suggested that a familiar pattern and the features within it are perceived better than an unfamiliar pattern. In Experiments 1 and 2, access to within-pattern colors in Stars and Stripes flags was equally efficient in the normal and the inverted orientations, thus suggesting that familiarity does not aid access to within-pattern features. However, in Experiment 3, which focused on the detection of the whole of a flag, rather than within-pattern colors, the selection of upright Stars and Stripes flags was significantly more efficient than that of inverted flags, thus confirming the greater familiarity of the former. I argue that familiarity aids the perception of a pattern only by allowing the whole pattern to be labeled as a single feature and does not directly aid access to features.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China. lqhuang@psy.cuhk.edu.hk
authors.forename: Liqiang
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Huang
mesh_terms: D003116:Color; D003118:Color Perception; D006801:Humans; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D014796:Visual Perception