title: The interplay of holistic shape, local feature and color information in object categorization.
abstract: Although it is widely accepted that colors facilitate object and scene recognition under various circumstances, several studies found no effects of color removal in tasks requiring categorization of briefly presented animals in natural scenes. In this study, three experiments were performed to test the assumption that the discrepancy between empirical data is related to variations of the available meaningful global information such as object shapes and contextual cues. Sixty-one individuals categorized chromatic and achromatic versions of intact and scrambled images containing either cars or birds. While color removal did not affect the classification of intact stimuli, the recognition of moderately scrambled achromatic images was more difficult. This effect was accompanied by amplitude modulations of occipital event-related potentials emerging from approximately 150ms post-stimulus. Our results indicate that colors facilitate stimulus classification, but this effect becomes prominent only in cases when holistic processing is not sufficient for stimulus recognition.
authors.affiliation: Doctoral School of Education, Faculty of Arts, University of Szeged, Petőfi Sándor sgt. 30-34, 6722 Szeged, Hungary.
authors.forename: Adrienn Aranka
authors.initials: AA
authors.lastname: Rokszin
authors.affiliation: Doctoral School of Education, Faculty of Arts, University of Szeged, Petőfi Sándor sgt. 30-34, 6722 Szeged, Hungary.
authors.forename: Dóra
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Győri-Dani
authors.affiliation: Department of Cognitive Psychology, Institute of Psychology, Eötvös Loránt University, Izabella u. 46, 1064 Budapest, Hungary.
authors.forename: Szilvia
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Linnert
authors.affiliation: Department of Cognitive Psychology, Institute of Psychology, Eötvös Loránt University, Izabella u. 46, 1064 Budapest, Hungary.
authors.forename: Attila
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Krajcsi
authors.affiliation: Department of Cognitive Psychology, Institute of Psychology, Eötvös Loránt University, Izabella u. 46, 1064 Budapest, Hungary.
authors.forename: Tamás
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Tompa
authors.affiliation: Department of Cognitive and Neuropsychology, Institute of Psychology, Faculty of Arts, University of Szeged, Egyetem u. 2, 6722 Szeged, Hungary. Electronic address: gaborcsifcsak@yahoo.co.uk.
authors.forename: Gábor
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Csifcsák
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D003118:Color Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D003210:Concept Formation / Q000502:physiology*; D003463:Cues; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Categorization; Color; ERP; Holistic; Local features; Scrambling