Is an Object an Object an Object? Cognitive and Neuropsychological Investigations of Domain Specificity in Visual Object Recognition Author(s): Martha J.

Farah Reviewed work(s): Source: Current Directions in Psychological Science, Vol. 1, No. 5 (Oct., 1992), pp. 164-169 Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. on behalf of Association for Psychological Science Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20182166 . Accessed: 06/02/2012 09:37
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SCIENCE CURRENTDIRECTIONS INPSYCHOLOGICAL leaving in recognition ability, while tact general intellectual abilities as well as perception of many of the basic elements of vision, such as lo cal contour, color, depth, and mo this condition, tion.4 People with retain full known as visual agnosia, of the nonvisual aspects knowledge them to rec of an object, enabling it or hearing it by touching ognize it might sound characteristic any make. They can also identify it from a verbal description. In associative visual in the (a term coined agnosia based on the belief 19th century, visual that an inability to associate with stored knowledge was the input

Is an Object an Object an Object? Cognitive and Neuropsychological Investigations of Domain Specificity Visual Object Recognition
Martha J. Farah

in

Are all types nized in the same ent kinds of visual systems used to

of objects recog or are differ way, object recognition different recognize Most current work

types of objects? in cognitive on object recognition or has assumed, science explicitly that all visual stimuli are implicitly, set of by a common recognized scientists mechanisms. Cognitive such as Marr1 and Biederman,2 who theo have proposed comprehensive do not ries of object recognition, specify different types of representa for different types tions or processes these scientists of stimuli. Rather, a single type of sys have described as wide tem capable of recognizing a range of stimuli as possible. have ques researchers Other of a general tioned the existence system, purpose pattern recognition that the and have instead suggested visual system has evolved numerous for recogniz subsystems specialized of stimuli. Proba ing different types of bly the most extreme proponent view was Konorski,3 who this sug gested that there were nine different subsystems used in visual recogni

tion. Figure 1 shows his taxonomy of distinct recognition systems. in favor of is the evidence What each of these two positions? Surpris ingly, relatively little systematic em to pirical work has been directed ward this issue. Researchers favoring are apparently a single system In guided by a faith in parsimony. the alternative view draws support from neuropsy empirical the evidence although chology, is often anecdotal. cited Thus, the we have a sin question of whether object recogni gle, general-purpose tion system or multiple subsystems different for recognizing specialized is an open empirical kinds of objects contrast, question. evidence search Imarshal In this article, from previous work in neu as well as current re ropsychology, with normal

underlying cause), there is consider able residual ability, perceptual such that the person may be able to see an object well enough to draw a copy of it. For exam recognizable ple, Figure 2 shows that an associative unable L.H., was along Within with the three pictures case agnosic, to recognize,

his copies of each. framework of current such people are theories of vision, to to have sustained damage likely

the highest levels of visual object

(e.g., the 3D models representation of Marr). does Associative visual agnosia not always affect the recognition of all types of stimuli equally. The se in some cases of lectivity observed that there may be labor within the vi system and pro in which the way can be subdi visual recognition of these vided. The most common is pure alexia, an im dissociations suggests agnosia some division of sual recognition vides clues as to pairment
tion.

and brain in my lab, to subjects damaged three ques the following address tions: First, are there specialized different for recognizing subsystems of visual stimuli? Second, how types are there? such subsystems many Third, what types of visual informa tion processing are these specialized for? specialized subsystems

of printed-word

recogni

Martha

). Farah is Professor of Psy chology at the University of Penn sylvania. The work of hers that is herein was carried out described she was at Carnegie Mellon while Address correspon University. dence to Martha J. Farah, Depart of ment of Psychology, University 3815 Walnut St., Pennsylvania,

NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL FOR EVIDENCE WITHIN SPECIALIZATION THEVISUALOBJECT RECOGNITIONSYSTEM

to the visual areas of the sometimes impair visual

Dissociations Printed-Word

Between Recognition and the

Recognition of Other Objects

People with pure alexia paired at reading, despite served ability to recognize are im

Philadelphia, PA 19104.

Damage brain can

the pre spoken

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SCIENCE 165 CURRENTDIRECTIONS IN PSYCHOLOGICAL

Q? t^

\& ?

tirely unable to read, the more usual involves ex form of the disorder read letter-by-letter tremely slow, ing. If such patients are required to in less recognize even a short word a few seconds, than they may fail entirely. Most people with pure al exia are not agnosic for objects other than printed words, which suggests that printed-word de recognition pends on at least some mechanisms that are not shared with other forms of visual recognition. this conclusion, Before accepting we must consider an alternative hy in that word recognition pothesis: same system that serves volves the

I Dissociations Recognition

Face and the Recognition

Between

of Other Objects
One of the dramatic dissociations within the neuropsychology of vision is found in prosopagnosia, the selec tive impairment of face recognition. cannot recognize fa Prosopagnosics miliar people by their faces alone and must rely on other cues for rec such as people's voices or ognition, distinctive clothing or hairstyles. The disorder can be so severe that even close friends and family members are not recognized. One prosopag nosic recounted sitting in his club and wondering why another mem was staring so intently at him. ber When he asked one of the waiters to investigate, he learned that he had in a mirror! been looking at himself many prosopagnosics Although rec have some degree of difficulty ognizing objects other than faces, in some cases the deficit appears strik for faces. DeRenzi6 ingly selective a man who was described suffi that "the prosopagnosic ciently of relatives and close identification an insurmountable friends posed if he could not rely on their problem voices." he was able Nevertheless, to identify all nonface objects with which he was presented, and to rec his own razor, wallet, eye items and other personal glasses, when presented along with several similar objects of the same type. inter The most straightforward with re of prosopagnosia, pretation ognize spect to the question posed at the is that there is a specialized outset, faces, not subsystem for recognizing needed for recognizing other types and that prosopagnosia of objects, to this sub results from damage as noted earlier, it system. However, is possible that faces and common are recognized using a single objects system, and that faces recognition are simply the most difficult type of Prosopagnosia object to recognize. as a mild could then be explained inwhich form of agnosia the impair

V-FC

V-Hu> V-L

ttf
Fig. 1. Konorski's nine

&
visual-gnostic

categories: (a) small, manipulable ob jects; (b) larger, partially manipulable objects; (c) nonmanipulable objects; (d) human faces; (e) emotional facial ex pressions; (f)animated objects; (g) signs; (h) handwriting; (i) positions of limbs. words write. and the preserved ability to (This leads to the almost par in which situation adoxical people to read what be unable may they Al have just written.) themselves are en some pure alexics though

for the recognition of other kinds of but taxes this system more objects, heavily, perhaps because word rec is learned later than other ognition or be forms of visual recognition, cause different words resemble one non more than different another to this al word objects. According the selective ternative hypothesis, in word recognition impairment sub does not imply that different systems of visual object recognition are required for recognizing words and nonword objects. The existence of the opposite dis sociation, namely, associative agno sia for objects without pure alexia, helps to rule out this alternative ex planation. There are a number of as sociative agnosics who are not al a man described exic. For example, im by Gomori and Hawryluk5 was a variety of at recognizing paired as well as the common objects, faces of his family and friends. Nev ertheless, he was able to read easily, even when lines had interfering across the printed drawn been a single dissocia words. Whereas within the be explained of a single, general purpose object system, recognition that the impaired by hypothesizing class of stimuli taxes that system more than the preserved heavily a so-called double dissocia class, tion strongly implies two separate tion framework can

Fig. 2. Examples of three pictures

L.H., an associative visual agnosic,

that

could not recognize (left), and his copies of these pictures (right).

I systems. I

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ment

only on the most task. This form of recognition taxing can be ruled alternative hypothesis out because dissocia the opposite also exists, namely, tion impaired recognition of common objects with For ex face recognition. preserved is detectable and Warrington7 ample, McCarthy a patient who was unable described to recognize a single picture from a long series of pictures of common

PATTERNS OF CO-OCCURRENCE AMONG THEASSOCIATIVE AGNOSIAS: DELINEATING THE SUBSYSTEMS VISUAL OF OBJECTRECOGNITION
At first glance, the pairwise disso of face, common-object, ciability and printed-word recognition would seem to imply that there are three different subsystems of visual recog for one of nition, each specialized If this of stimuli. these categories were then we should observe true, all combinations of spared and im paired face, common-object, and printed-word recognition, provided we look at a large enough number of cases. With the goal of testing this I recently reviewed 99 prediction, cases of associative for agnosia, each case noting the available infor mation on the patient's face, com rec and printed-word mon-object, 1 shows the Table ognition.8 distribution of different patterns of ability and deficit for those cases in which information was given about the recognition of all three catego ries of stimuli. For two of the possi ble patterns, there was only one case

Fig. 3. Diagram representing the relative importance of two hypothesized types of visual recognition ability for recognizing
faces, words. common objects, and printed

satisfactorily objects, but performed with pictures of the faces of famous The neuropsychological people. therefore suggest that the recog data nition of faces and common objects is carried out by at least partially dis tinct subsystems of the visual sys
tem.

that appeared to instantiate the in each of Furthermore, pattern. those case reports, there was an in in the way the case was consistency such that a description of described, in one part of the case the patient each to the unusual pat report conformed a description in a dif whereas tern, ferent part of the same case report did not. The distribution of cases shown in Table 1 is consistent with two, rather than three, underlying types of vi sual recognition ability. As depicted by the diagram in Figure 3, one sub for face recogni system is essential rec useful for common-object tion, and not at all needed for ognition, whereas printed-word recognition, is essential the other subsystem for useful for printed-word recognition, and common-object recognition, not at all needed for face recogni to this framework, tion. According one should never observe impaired recognition of common objects with of faces and recognition and rarely or never printed words, observe of impaired recognition intact faces and printed words with of common recognition objects. These are, in fact, the two patterns for which no clear cases exist.9 intact

The dissociations among the ag nosias for faces, common objects, cannot and printed words be ex in any straightforward way, plained, that all three stim by the hypothesis are recognized ulus domains by a rec object single, general-purpose Instead, these dis system. ognition that people have orders suggest evolved different of special types ized recognition systems for different types of stimuli. This raises the ques tion: How many sub specialized are there? systems

Table 1. Results of literature review for possible combinations of impaired and spared recognition of faces, common objects, and printed words Impaired and spared Number classes of stimuli of cases Impaired: faces;
spared: common objects, words 27

Impaired: faces, common objects; spared: words 15 Impaired: faces, common objects, words Impaired: words;
spared: Impaired: faces, common common objects, objects words;

22 included
in search

Not

OF TWO TYPES STRUCTURAL DESCRIPTION?

In the remainder of this article, I a conjecture the present concerning functions of the two types of visual and some at systems, recognition and I tempts that my collaborators have made to test this conjecture. As a starting point, recall that many cur

spared: faces

16

Impaired: common objects; 1? spared: faces, words Impaired: faces, words; spared: common objects 1?

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CURRENTDIRECTIONS IN PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE 167 rent theories hypothesize of object recognition some form of structural that is, a representation first noted

description, of an object's

in terms of shape are explicitly which repre parts, sented as shapes in their own right, the relations among along with the part parts. The more extensive the more parts there decomposition,

rington,12 and nonorthographic stimuli, and has since been confirmed in differ ent ways by other researchers. In all these cases, however, the evidence been associational: Subjects who have pure alexia are also found has to have an impairment in the recog nition of multiple items. at and I13 recently to find out whether the lat tempted ter was a causal factor in the word Wallace of pure recognition impairment or whether itwas associated alexia, for some other reason (e.g., neigh boring parts of the brain involved in the two abilities, such that a single

by Kinsbourne and War using both orthographic

unmasked masked

will

be in the object's representa tion, but the simpler those parts will be. The less the part decomposition, the fewer parts there will be in an but the more object's representation, complex that word tensive those parts will be. The ex

word length

conjecture being put forth here is

recognition part involves and decomposition, hence requires the ability to repre sent a large number of parts, whereas face recognition involves and virtually no part decomposition, hence requires the ability sent complex parts. to repre

lesion would be likely to impair

both). We used additive factors logic to test the hypothesis that letter-by letter reading results from difficulty with specifically visual processing of the multiple letters of a word. Be cause pure alexics read (if at all) let ter by letter, the time it takes them to is directly proportional read a word to the number of letters in the word. If the slow, length-dependent read result ing times of these patients from impairment at a visual stage of to addi then, according processing, tive factors logic, a manipulation the difficulty of vi should exacerbate the effects. By varying word-length word length and visual quality, we an interaction be should observe tween their effects. As shown in Fig ure 4, we found just this pattern of results in a pure alexic subject, but sual encoding not in control structed subjects who were to read letter by letter. in known to affect
-*-*unmasked masked

word length Fig. 4. Reading latency as a function of word length and visual quality, (a) Re sults for a pure alexic, letter-by-letter reader instructed to read as quickly as possible, (b) Results for normal subjects instructed to read letter by letter as quickly as possible. in the visual real parts logically that underlie face representations A recent series of ex recognition. Iconducted in collabora periments tion with Tanaka suggests that they do not, or that they do so to a lesser extent than the features of other, nonface, objects.14 We reasoned as follows: To the extent that some portion of a pattern represented as a part for of recognition, when that purposes is presented later in isola portion tion, subjects should be able to iden tify it as a portion of a familiar pat tern. To the extent that the portion does not correspond to the way the visual subject's whole pattern, recognized. to subjects the system parses that portion pre is explicitly

Reading and the Ability to RepresentMultiple Parts

Itwould not surprise most non to learn that printed

by first recog nizing their letters. In fact, experi mental data and untutored intuitions agree on this issue: For example, found Johnston and McClelland10 word recognition thattachistoscopic was significantly more disrupted by a mask made up of letters than by one made up of letter fragments, consistent with the idea that a nec is essary stage in word recognition the explicit recognition of the com letters. This finding suggests ponent that words are a paradigm case of a type of object that must be decom into multiple parts to be rec posed ognized.11 There that the in pure al impairment underlying exia consists of an inability to recog evidence nize multiple or neously shapes, either simulta in rapid sequence, in the laborious letter-by is also

psychologists words are recognized

Face Recognition and the Ability to Represent Complex Wholes Without Part Decomposition Just as words seem to have a nat ural decomposition into letters, so faces seem decomposable into such as eyes, noses, and mouths. this intuition However, alone does not tell us whether such facial features features play the role of psycho

sented in isolation is less likely to be

and I taught a set of faces, identify along with a set of nonface objects, and then assessed the subjects' abil Tanaka

resulting letter reading that is the hallmark of this syndrome. Such evidence was

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pat ity to recognize both the whole terns and their parts. Examples of in study and test stimuli are shown 5. Relative to the recognition Figure of such nonface objects as houses, inverted faces, and scrambled faces, of intact upright the recognition faces showed a greater disadvantage for parts relative to wholes. Figure 6 shows the results of the experiment recognition of faces and comparing
houses.

faces as complex, unde To test this hy wholes. composed Drain, Tanaka, pothesis directly, and I compared the relative advan faces over face parts tage of whole for normal and for a subjects to encode prosopagnosic subject, case L.H.15 Our initial plan was to administer to L.H. the same task that Tanaka and I used with the normal subjects, but intensive effort, L.H. could despite not learn to recognize a set of faces. We to a short therefore switched a term memory inwhich paradigm face was presented for study, fol lowed by a blank interval, followed of a face. by a second presentation The subjects' task was to say

whether the first and second faces were the same or different. There were two different conditions for the of the first face: either presentation into four separate "exploded" frames containing the head, eyes, and mouth (in their proper rel nose, ative spatial position within each or intact. The second face frame) was always presented in the normal format, so that the two conditions can be called "parts-to-whole" and "whole-to-whole." Normal subjects better in the "whole-to performed whole" thus providing condition, further evidence that their percep tion of a whole face is not equivalent to the perception of its parts. In con in L.H. performed equally well trast, an over the two conditions, despite to the nor all accuracy comparable mal consistent with the subjects', that he has lost the ability hypothesis to see faces as wholes.

that normal subjects em less part decomposi ploy relatively tion in recognizing faces than in other objects, pros recognizing in face rec impairment opagnosics' Given ognition might be due to an inability

CONCLUSIONS

Hi

1
The evidence reviewed suggests answers to the three questions posed at the outset. is not First, an object an object is not an object. The dou ble dissociations that exist between disorders of face and nonface object and between disorders recognition, of word and nonword object recog nition, are inconsistent with the op eration of a single, general-purpose Instead, system. recognition object they suggest that there is a division the object of labor within recogni tion system, with different sub needed for different types of systems visual stimulus. the pairwise Second, although of faces, common ob dissociability and printed words might seem jects, to imply the existence of three dis a closer look at the tinct subsystems, patterns of co-occurrence suggests that we need postulate only two sub one that is essential for systems: word useful for com recognition, mon-object recognition, and not

Fig. name

5.

Examples Larry's

of

pairs face

of

test

items

from

an experiment test was

on

the

recognition

of

faces

and houses. Subjects studied whole

(e.g., forced-choice format, is Larry's door?") is Larry's face?" or Larry's either for or or for

items individually and learned to

administered "Which a single part (e.g., item with only house?").

identify them by
nose?" or (e.g.,

The house). an isolated the whole

in a two-alternative is Larry's part

"Which "Which

changed

"Which

is Larry's

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CURRENTDIRECTIONS INPSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE 169

Part I I Isolated Condition

H Whole Object Condition

Notes
1. D. Marr, Vision (Freeman, San Francisco, 1982). 2. I.Biederman, Recognition-by-components: A theory of human image understanding, Psychologi cal Review, 94, 115-147 (1987). Note that Bieder man did suggest that different types of processes to recognize stimuli at different lev may be needed els of specificity, and that his theory is primarily suited to recognition at the basic object level. 3. J. Konorski, Integrative Activity of the Brain 1967). (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 4. For a review, see M.J. Farah, Visual Agnosia: Disorders of Object Recognition and What They Tell Us About Normal Vision (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1990). 5. A.J. Gomori and G.A. Hawryluk, Visual ag nosia without alexia, Neurology, 34, 947-950 (1984). 6. E. DeRenzi, Current issues in prosopagnosia, in Aspects of Face Processing, ( H.D. Ellis, M.A. and A. Young, Eds. Martinus Jeeves, F. Newcome, 1986). Nijhoff, Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 7. R.A. McCarthy and E.K. Warrington, Visual associative agnosia: A clinical-anatomical study of a single case, Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and (1986). Psychiatry, 49, 1233-1240 8. M.j. Farah, Patterns of co-occurrence among the associative agnosias: Implications for visual ob ject representation, Cognitive Neuropsychology, 8, 1-19(1991). 9. This hypothesis also predicts that patients with apparently pure prosopagnosia or pure alexia should, with sufficiently sensitive testing (e.g., de graded or tachistoscopic presentations of stimuli), show impairment in common-object recognition as well, and that this impairment should be qualita tively different for the two types of patients. 10. J.C. Johnston and j.L. McClelland, Experi mental tests of a hierarchical model of word identi fication, Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Be (1980). havior, 19, 503-524 11. The word superiority effect, by which letters inwords are perceived better than words embedded in nonwords or alone, might appear to presented imply that words are perceived holistically, without into letters. However, the implica decomposition tions of this effect are weaker than this. It implies in addition to individual letter represen only that, tations, word or letter-cluster representations are ac tivated, and that the activation states of the latter representations influence those of the former. 12. M. Kinsbourne and E.K.Warrington, A dis order of simultaneous form perception, Brain, 85, 461-486(1962). 13. M.j. Farah and M.A. Wallace, Pure alexia as a visual impairment: A reconsideration, Cognitive 8, 313-334 (1991). Neuropsychology, 14. J.W. Tanaka and M.j. Farah, Parts and in face recognition, Quarterly Journal of Ex wholes (in press). perimental Psychology 15. M.J. Farah, J.W. Tanaka, and M. Drain, in preparation), University of Pennsyl [manuscript vania, Philadelphia.

I ? LU CC O ? LU O ?C LU ?.

80

70

60

X HOUSES

FACES

Fig. 6. Percentage of correct recognition of faces and houses and their parts from the experiment described in Figure 5.

needed for face recognition, and an other that is essential for face recog nition, useful for object recognition, and not needed for word recogni
tion.

interpretation of in terms of the types of visual information process ing they carry out, is the following: is needed to rec The first subsystem part de ognize objects by extensive numerous in which composition, be encoded. The second to recognize is needed subsystem little or no part decom objects with in which position, relatively com Further plex parts must be encoded. is needed to test the empirical work truth of this interpretation. In addi to clarify the is needed tion, work reasons why different types of ob parts must

Third, a tentative these subsystems,

jects come to be recognized by these different For example, subsystems. what aspects of the statistics of sim ilarity and difference among individ ual objects make extensive part de useful forwords, less so composition for common and relatively objects, useless for faces?

of this Acknowledgments?Preparation review, and much of the work described of Naval herein, was supported by Office Research Grant N00014-91-J1546, Na Institute of Mental tional Grant Health R01 MH48274, National Institutes of Health NS01405, nell-Pew science. Award K04 Development a grant from the McDon in Cognitive Neuro Program I gratefully Jim acknowledge in developing Tanaka's collaboration the ideas about face recognition that are pre and sented here. Career

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