PSYC226 –

CHAPTER 4:
Cognitive
Psychology

RECOGNIZING OBJECTS Natalie Tayim

American
University of
Beirut

Spring 2020
 RECOGNIZING OBJECTS:
LECTURE OUTLINE
• Introduction: Visual agnosias
• The importance of features
• Experimental results in word recognition
• Models of word recognition (feature nets)
• Models of object recognition
• Face recognition

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 RECOGNIZING OBJECTS

 How to go from recognizing features of a stimulus to

recognizing objects

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 VISUAL AGNOSIAS

 Apperceptive (integrative) agnosia (acquired)

 Can perceive parts of objects (features)
 Difficulty binding them to perceive whole objects and recognize
them in their entirety (except faces)
 Example: cannot copy a drawing correctly, although can draw it from
memory
 Parietal lobe damage
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ze8VVtBgK7A

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INTEGRATIVE AGNOSIA
 VISUAL AGNOSIA

 Associative agnosia (acquired)

 Can perceive objects (can copy/draw them), but cannot retrieve
their name or function
 Cannot link this input to visual knowledge
 Inability to recognize people or objects
 Cannot match object/person with memory
 Differs from apperceptive agnosia, a perception-based impairment
 Occipito-temporal lobe damage

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 RECOGNIZING OBJECTS

 Perceiving simple features: see Chapter 3

 Accessing visual knowledge: see Chapters 9 – 11
 Going from features to objects: see Chapter 4 (this chapter)

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 RECOGNIZING OBJECTS

 The process of object recognition is complex

 Variations in “stimulus input”
 Contextual influences

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 RECOGNIZING OBJECTS

Variations in perspective: You can still recognize the cats

as cats despite viewing them from the front or the back

Incomplete

information

about the occluded

cat

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 RECOGNIZING OBJECTS

 What does this say?

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 RECOGNIZING OBJECTS

 What does this say?

 Contextual influence

Same stimulus

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 RECOGNIZING OBJECTS

 Bottom-up processing
 “Data-driven”, or stimulus-driven, effects
 Feedforward neural projections?
 Top-down processing
 “Concept-driven”, or knowledge-driven, effects
 Feedback neural projections?

 Assumption that more complex objects, i.e. context, are

processed higher up in the brain’s hierarchy

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 TEMPLATE-MATCHING

 Early model of object recognition

 Perception matched to template stored in memory

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 TEMPLATE-MATCHING

 Limitations
 Variation in input (viewpoint, occlusion)
 Infinity of templates

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 THE IMPORTANCE OF FEATURES

 Before identifying an object, one has to identify its features

 In order to identify a feature, one has to identify the feature’s
features (lines, orientation, angle, color)

 Features
 Building blocks
 Do not change much with viewpoint
 Still present in occluded objects
 Play a role in visual search
 Visual search tasks: tasks in which participants are asked to examine a
display and to judge whether a particular target is present in the display
or not
 Faster to look for one feature than to look for a combination of features
 Feature detection is fast and occurs in parallel for many objects in the scene

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 THE IMPORTANCE OF FEATURES

 Even if not sufficient, feature detection seems to be a necessary

step in object detection: there is experimental evidence that it
comes before

 Evidence for the primacy of feature recognition

 Integrative agnosia
 Patients able to identify features, but unable to bind them
 Suggests feature detection comes first
 Presence of feature detectors in visual cortex
 Orientation detectors in V1
 Visual search: single feature vs conjunction search
 Single search: identifying a previously requested target amongst distractors
that differ from the target by a unique visual feature such as color, shape,
orientation, or size
 Conjunction search: identifying a previously requested target surrounded by
distractors possessing one or more common visual features with the target
itself 16
 VISUAL SEARCH

 Find the vertical line.

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 VISUAL SEARCH

 Find the green-colored line.

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 VISUAL SEARCH

 Find the red-colored line.

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 VISUAL SEARCH

 Single search  Conjunction search

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 VISUAL SEARCH

 Single search  Conjunction search

 Parallel  Serial
 Automatic (pop out)  Requires attention

T X T X
T T T T
X T X T T
X X X
T S T T X T
T T X T X T
X X

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 WORD RECOGNITION

 Object recognition begins (according to many accounts) with

feature detection
 How are these features bound into complete objects?
 Word recognition: illustration of how we put features together
to make words

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 WORD RECOGNITION

 What factors influence word recognition?

 Previous exposure
 Familiarity/frequency
 Recency
 Repetition priming
 Presentation time (length of presentation)

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 FACTORS INFLUENCING WORD
RECOGNITION

 Word recognition is fast and automatic

 To make task difficult (typical word recognition experiment)
 Brief presentation of stimuli (approx. 20–30 ms)
 Tachistoscope: device used to present stimuli for precise amounts of
time
 “Tachistoscopic presentations” with modern computers
 In this way, researchers can be certain that stimulus presented for a certain amount of
time is visible for exactly that amount and no longer
 Stimulus followed by post-stimulus mask
 Often a random pattern of lines and curves or random jumble of letters
 Interrupts continued processing that participants might try to do for
stimulus just presented
 Goal: How long does it take to recognize a word?
 Vary presentation length

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 FACTORS INFLUENCING WORD
RECOGNITION

XJDKEL
TREE
TREE XJDKEL
 Post-stimulus mask
 Clears retinal image and sensory trace of stimulus
 Interrupts continued processing
 Factors influencing recognition time:
 Word familiarity/frequency
 Priming (repetition priming)

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FACTORS INFLUENCING WORD RECOGNITION

 Visual words can be recognized with extremely brief

presentations (e.g. 40 ms) under right conditions
 Words that are more frequent in language are better
recognized
 Also true of words that have been recently seen
 First exposure primes you for subsequent exposures
 In case of multiple exposures, you experience repetition priming

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FACTORS INFLUENCING WORD RECOGNITION

 Familiarity/frequency  Repetition priming

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 THE WORD SUPERIORITY EFFECT

 Participants are shown either a word (e.g. “DARK”) or a single

letter (e.g. “E”)/meaningless string of letters (e.g. “RDAK”)
 They are then given a choice between two letters and are to
indicate which letter the prior display contained (in the first
example, the question might be “Did the display contain an E
or a K?”)
 Two alternative forced choices
 Responses are more accurate when the original stimulus was
a word, compared to when it was a single letter or within a
string of letters that doesn’t form a word
 Importance of context on feature recognition
 Words processed faster/better than letters

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THE WORD SUPERIORITY EFFECT

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 FACTORS INFLUENCING WORD/
LETTER RECOGNITION
 Well-formedness
 Strings of letters that resemble real words (pseudowords, e.g. HANE)
are recognized faster/better than those that don’t (e.g. random
strings: HNAE)
 What is a well-formed string of letters?
 Respects spelling regularities of the language (organized like existing
words)
 Frequency of letter combinations
 Well-formed strings also produce a word “superiority” effect
compared to random letter strings
 Could suggest that words are perceived as a whole as fast as, or
faster than, individual letters, and in parallel with them

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 MAKING ERRORS
(OVER-REGULARIZATION)
 Well-formedness also influences errors
 Example of a likely error: “DPUM” misread as “DRUM”
 Example of an unlikely error: “DRUM” misread as “DPUM”
 Reading quickly-presented words that also follow common spelling
patterns
 Non-words or pseudowords mistaken for real words
 People can perceive stimuli as being more “regular” than they
actually are
 Example: “TPUM” misread as “TRUMPET”

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FEATURE NETS AND WORD RECOGNITION

 One possibility for understanding how the visual system

recognizes words is through a system called a feature net

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FEATURE NETS AND WORD RECOGNITION

Complex

Simple

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FEATURE NETS AND WORD RECOGNITION

 Feature detectors are activated when detector is in field of

view
 Could correspond to V1 cells firing APs
 Activation of feature detectors activate letter detectors
 Bottom-up activation: lower levels activate higher levels

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 FEATURE NETS

 Each detector has an activation level

 With input, this activation level increases
 Detectors “fire” when their response threshold is reached
 Detectors needed for recognizing frequently used words have
relatively high levels of activation
 Thus, even a weak signal (e.g. a brief or dim presentation of the word)
will bring these detectors to their response threshold and will be enough
to make them fire
 As a result, word will be recognized even with degraded input
 Repetition priming explained in similar terms
 Presenting a word once will cause relevant detectors to fire
 Once they have fired, activation levels will be temporarily lifted (because
of recency of use)
 Therefore, only weak signal will be needed to make detectors fire again
 As a result, word will be more easily recognized the second time around
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 FEATURE NETS

 How do we explain the priming and frequency effects?

 Detectors remain activated for a certain time  explains
priming/recency
 “warm up”/pre-activation effect
 Detectors that are used often are easier to activate  frequency (if
applied to words)
 ”practice effect”

 Detectors not necessarily neurons

 Could correspond to a group of neurons, or a certain pattern of
neuronal activation

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FEATURE NETS AND WELL-FORMEDNESS

 Can such a model explain the effect of well-formedness on

recognition?
 We have to have an intermediate layer of detectors that
activates for particular combinations of letters  bigrams
 Then, the frequency effect of some combinations could
account for the well-formedness effect
 You have probably never seen the sequence “HICE” before
 But you have seen the letter pair HI (in “HIT,” “HIGH,” or “HILL”) and
the pair CE (“FACE,” “MICE,” “JUICE”)
 The detectors for these letter pairs, therefore, have high activation
levels at the start
 Do not need much additional input to reach their threshold
 As a result, these detectors will fire with only weak input.
 That will make the corresponding letter combinations easy to
recognize, facilitating the recognition of strings like “HICE”
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FEATURE NETS AND WELL-FORMEDNESS

 An extra layer of detectors is necessary

 Bigram detectors between letter detectors and word detectors

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 RECOVERY FROM CONFUSION

 Bigram layer can also explain how we resolve recognition in

the case of incomplete information
 If a letter is ambiguously recognized because only some of these
features were identified, frequency constraints on the bigrams will
help decide which bigram was seen
 Frequency/familiarity of bigrams explain well-formedness effect
 Frequent bigrams more easily activated
 Bigrams from pseudowords more likely to be activated than
bigrams from random strings

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RECOVERY FROM CONFUSION

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 RECOGNITION ERRORS

 Downside to this organization is that it leads to errors of over-

regularization
 Pseudowords being perceived as real words by mistake
 The network is biased towards recognizing frequent bigrams (spelling
regularities) or words

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 AMBIGUOUS INPUT

THE occurs more CAT occurs more

frequently than TAE frequently than CHT

 Context explained by frequency

 Model also explains word superiority effect
 Even if individual letters are not perceived fully, weak activation will lead
to activation of bigrams and word detectors because of frequency effects
 Words can reach a threshold (be activated enough) while letters do not
 Despite ambiguity on the central letter, words are recognized as THE and CAT, not TAE and CHT
 When asked about the letter, subjects reported it correctly since they
perceived the word
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 DISTRIBUTED KNOWLEDGE

 Feature net models are an example of parallel distributed

processing (or connectionist) models
 Knowledge about letters, letter combinations, and words is
distributed in the feature nets
 Properties of connectionist models:
 Knowledge is not locally represented
 Rather, feature nets contain distributed knowledge
 Knowledge is implicit (e.g. spelling regularities are not represented
explicitly as rules)
 The net “knows” the rules of English spelling, but the rules themselves are
not explicitly represented
 It is the combination of many elementary operations in many detectors
that represents these rules
 It is not only that we know the words, but also we know what are the more
likely combinations of letters
 Accounts for human performance, including errors
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 EFFICIENCY VS ACCURACY

 By construction, feature nets make mistakes (by being biased

towards correctly spelled words)
 Note that the errors made by the network are produced by the same
mechanisms responsible for its advantages—the ability to deal with
ambiguous inputs and to recover from errors
 Mechanisms that resolve ambiguous inputs and recover from errors
can also result in recognition errors
 The network sacrifices a small amount of accuracy for a great
deal of efficiency
 Allows fast reading: words can be read without identifying all the
letters
 Example: How many Fs in the following sentence?
FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT OF YEARS OF
SCIENTIFIC STUDY COMBINED WITH THE
EXPERIENCE OF YEARS.
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 TOP-DOWN INFLUENCES ON
WORD RECOGNITION
 Feature nets can account for certain context effects (word
superiority) through bottom-up processes
 Other contextual effects cannot be accounted for by feature
nets: semantic priming
 Semantic context facilitates word recognition
 Words are easier to recognize as part of a sentence than in
isolation
 Refers to observation that a response to a target (e.g. dog) is faster
when it is preceded by a semantically related prime (e.g. cat)
compared to an unrelated prime (e.g. car)
 Semantic priming may occur because the prime partially activates
related words or concepts, facilitating their later processing or
recognition

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 DESCENDANTS OF THE FEATURE NET

 Extension of the model that preserves the idea of a network

of feature detectors

 McClelland and Rumelhart’s Interactive Activation Model

 Emphasizes the role of inhibitory and feedback connections among
detectors

 Recognition by components (RBC) model

 Applies the feature net model to recognition of three-dimensional
objects

 Recognition via multiple views model

 Proposes that object recognition depends on viewing perspective

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 THE MCCLELLAND AND RUMELHART MODEL
INTERACTIVE ACTIVATION MODEL
 This is a much more complex feature net, with feedforward,
lateral, and feedback loops
 Higher level word detectors can influence lower level detectors
 Information flows bottom-up, top-down, and within the same level
 Detectors at any level can also influence other detectors at the same
level (e.g., letter detectors can inhibit other letter detectors; word
detectors can inhibit other word detectors)
 There are both excitatory connections and inhibitory connections
 Excitatory connections allow one detector to activate its neighbors
 Inhibitory connections allow detectors to inhibit their neighbors
 Bigram detectors are not necessary in this model
 Word superiority and well-formedness effect explained by feedback
connections between word letter detectors

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 THE MCCLELLAND AND RUMELHART MODEL
INTERACTIVE ACTIVATION MODEL
 The McClelland and Rumelhart (1981) pattern-recognition model includes
both excitatory connections (indicated by red arrows) and inhibitory
connections (indicated by connections with dots)
 Connections within a specific level are also possible
 For example, activation of the “TRIP” detector will inhibit the detectors for “TRAP,”
“TAKE,” and “TIME”

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 THE MCCLELLAND AND RUMELHART MODEL
INTERACTIVE ACTIVATION MODEL
 In original model, feature detectors can only increase
activation of other features
 In this model, some detectors can also inhibit other detectors
 That is, decrease the other detector’s activation when they are
activated
 Introducing inhibitory and top-down connections can explain
well-formedness and word superiority effects without need for
bigram detectors
 Word detector activated by certain letters will inhibit letters that do
not appear in the word
 Overall, letters compatible with words that contain detected letters
will be activated more than letters that are not compatible with these
words
 Existence of feedback and lateral connections correspond well
to what we know of the brain
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 INTERACTIVE ACTIVATION MODEL

 Semantic context effects:

 Word detectors can be activated by higher-level semantic units
through top-down connections

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 RECOGNITION BY COMPONENTS

 Can we extend these models to other objects than words?

 The main question is how to go from elementary visual
features to full visual objects
 Hypothesizes an intermediary level: geons (geometric ions)
 Basic building blocks of object recognition (analogous to letters of the
alphabet for word recognition)
 Simple 3D shapes
 We would need about 30 to recognize all possible objects

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RECOGNITION BY COMPONENTS

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 RECOGNITION BY COMPONENTS

 Hierarchy of detectors
 Feature detectors (e.g. curves,
Object model
edges)
 Geon detectors
 “Geon assemblies” Geon assemblies
representing relations
between geons
 Object model: a 3D
representation of complete,
recognized object
Geon detectors
 Bottom-up recognition

Feature detectors
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 RECOGNITION BY COMPONENTS

 Geons identified by:

 Edges (rather than textures or colors)
 Non-accidental (view-invariant) properties of edges

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 RECOGNITION BY COMPONENTS

 Evidence for existence of geons:

 Priming experiment
 More priming when geons are conserved between prime and target
Same geons

Different geons

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Prime Target
 RECOGNITION BY COMPONENTS

 Viewpoint-independent
 Geons can be identified from virtually any angle of view
 Thus, the object model can be activated and the object can be
recognized
 Example: No matter what your position is relative to a cat, you’ll be able
to identify its geons and thus identify the cat (even from just a few geons)
 Partial occlusion of objects does not necessarily prevent recognition
 Moreover, it seems that most objects can be recognized from
just a few geons
 As a consequence, geon-based models like RBC can recognize
an object even if many of the object’s geons are hidden from
view
 RBC model limited to recognition of objects with different 3D
structures, not fine discrimination of objects with the same
structure (e.g. face recognition)
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 RECOGNITION VIA MULTIPLE VIEWS

 Multiple views of objects are stored in memory

 Mental rotation is required if the current view does not match one of
the stored views
 There are too many possible views of any given object to store them all
 Speed of recognition will be viewpoint-dependent
 Recognition is faster or slower depending on the viewing angle
 Example: You’ll recognize Felix as your cat only if you can match your
current view of Felix with one of these remembered views
 But the number of views in memory is limited – maybe 6 or so
 And so, in many cases, your current view won’t line up with any of the
available images
 In that situation, you will need to “rotate” the current view to bring it
into alignment with one of the views in memory, and this mental
rotation will cause a slight delay in the recognition

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 RECOGNITION VIA MULTIPLE VIEWS

 Hierarchy of detectors
 Each successive layer processes more complex aspects of the whole
 Detectors represent a particular viewpoint

 Inferotemporal cortex (the what pathway)

 Many of these neurons are object-specific, and many of these object-
specific cells are also view-tuned
 View-tuned neurons fire most strongly to specific views of the target
object

 RBC model can be modified to include multiple views

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 RECOGNITION VIA MULTIPLE VIEWS

 Evidence that object recognition is view-dependent

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 RECOGNITION VIA MULTIPLE VIEWS

 Evidence that object recognition is view-dependent

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 RECOGNITION VIA MULTIPLE VIEWS

 Speed of recognition is viewpoint-dependent (even when

geons are conserved between views)

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 RECOGNITION VIA MULTIPLE VIEWS

 Is object recognition viewpoint-dependent?

 Some aspects of object recognition may be viewpoint-
dependent while other aspects are not
 Researchers documented:
 Viewpoint independence in left occipital cortex
 Activity in fusiform area was the same even when an object was viewed
from a novel perspective
 Viewpoint dependence in right occipital cortex
 Activity in fusiform area was different when object viewed from novel
perspective

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RECOGNITION VIA MULTIPLE VIEWS

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 RECOGNITION VIA MULTIPLE VIEWS

 Perceiver’s task may be crucial here

 Some neuroscience data suggest that:
 Categorization tasks (“Is this a cup?”) may rely on viewpoint-
independent processing in the brain
 Identification tasks (“Is this the cup I showed you before?”) may rely
on viewpoint-dependent processing

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 FACE RECOGNITION

 Pr os opa gn os ia is a type of a gn o sia a ls o k n own a s fa c e blin dn e s s (o th e r wi se

n or m a l v isi on )
 Such people can recognize a face as a face (including their own) but cannot recognize
whose face it is
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwCrxomPbtY
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vQGPcYfIAo

 S om e pe o ple a r e “ s u per - r e c og ni ze rs ”
 They are extremely accurate at face recognition even faces viewed only briefly at some
distant point in the past
 More successful at tasks that require “face matching”
 Judging whether two different views of a face actually show the same person
 But they have no other perceptual- or memory-based advantages

 E ve n in people wh o a r e no t abn or m a lly goo d or ba d a t fa ce re c o gn itio n ,

r e c ogn i zin g fa ce s in vo lves s pe c ia li ze d pr oc e s s e s

 I n a ll pe ople, t ho u gh , fa ce re c o gn itio n s e e m s to in vo lve pro ce ss e s diffe re nt

fro m th os e u s ed fo r oth e r fo rm s of r e c o gn itio n 65
 FACE RECOGNITION

 There are differences in the way people process faces and

other objects
 Inversion effect
 Upside-down faces are much more difficult to recognize than upside-down
objects (e.g. houses)
 For objects, the difference between right-side-up and upside-down
recognition can decrease with training, but not for faces
 Perception and memory for faces are also highly viewpoint-
dependent, much more so than for other objects

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 FACE RECOGNITION:
FACE INVERSION EFFECT

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 FACE RECOGNITION

 Do these two faces look different?

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FACE RECOGNITION

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 FACE RECOGNITION:
THATCHERIZED FACES
 Is there anything wrong with these faces?

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 FACE RECOGNITION:
THATCHERIZED FACES
 How about now?

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 FACE RECOGNITION

 Some researchers suggest face recognition is not the only

thing that is special
 For example, a bird-watcher who developed prosopagnosia lost the
ability to distinguish faces and types of warblers
 Another person who developed prosopagnosia lost the ability to
distinguish types of cars

 The fusiform face area (FFA) is particularly responsive to

faces and is also activated when specialists perceived objects
in their field of expertise (cars, birds)
 Unclear whether this specialized recognition system is specialized in
faces (and anything that looks like faces) or any object that requires
fine discriminations and that one might specialize in

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 HOLISTIC RECOGNITION

 Face stimuli seem to be processed differently than most other

objects
 Not part by part, but as a whole  holistic perception
 Evidence: composite effect

 Face recognition depends on face’s overall configuration

 Features still matter in this holistic process, but because of
the relationships they create within the configuration
 It’s the relationships, not the features on their own, that
guide face recognition

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 HOLISTIC RECOGNITION

 Who is this?

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 HOLISTIC RECOGNITION

 Who is this?

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 HOLISTIC RECOGNITION

 Composite effect
 The relationship among features guide face recognition

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 HOLISTIC RECOGNITION

 Do these faces have the same eyes?

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 HOLISTIC RECOGNITION

 What about now?

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 HOLISTIC RECOGNITION

 Composite effect:
 Comparison of features is easier in composite than in whole faces
 Not observed for (most) other objects
 The relationships among features guide face recognition

79
 HOLISTIC RECOGNITION

 Familiarity may influence how you recognize faces

 Reliance on relationships among internal facial features for familiar
faces
 Reliance on the face’s outer parts (e.g. hair, head shape) for
unfamiliar faces
 “Cross-race” face perception: tendency for people to be more
accurate in recognizing faces from their own racial
background
 Potentially different recognition mechanisms (or effect of expertise)

80
 HOLISTIC RECOGNITION

 Holistic recognition: perception of the overall configuration

rather than an assemblage of parts
 There seems to be a difference in the way people process
familiar faces and faces of strangers they have only seen a
few times

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 TOP-DOWN INFLUENCES ON
OBJECT RECOGNITION
 Limits of feature nets:
 Some target objects depend on configurations, not individual
features
 Knowledge that is external to object recognition nevertheless
influences recognition
 For example, words are easier to recognize as part of a sentence than in
isolation
 Semantic priming aids recognition
 If someone tells you you’re going to see the name of a food item, you’re much more likely to
identify the word CELERY
 In this case, word recognition has been influenced not by visual properties of the
words (or their frequency/familiarity), but by their meaning
 Object recognition is not a self-contained process, but can be
influenced by other cognitive processes such as memory, knowledge,
etc… (beyond word familiarity effects)

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 TOP-DOWN INFLUENCES ON
OBJECT RECOGNITION
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 R o u g hly 5 0 m s l a t e r (a n d t hu s 1 8 0 m s a f t e r t a r g e t c a m e int o v ie w), b ra in
a c t iv it y in c r e a se d f u r t h e r b a c k in b ra in (i n t h e rig ht he m isp h e re ’ s f u sif o rm
a re a ), ind i c a t i n g s u c c e s sf u l r e c o gn it io n
 T his p a t t e r n n o t e v i d e n t w h e n o b je c t re c o g nit io n w a s e a sy (b e c a u se o f lo n g e r
p re se nt a t i o n o f t a r g e t )
 S e nsib ly , t o p - d o w n p r o c e ssin g p la y s la rg e r ro le whe n b o t t o m - u p p ro c e ss ing is
s o m e ho w l i m i t e d o r i n a d e q u a t e

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CHAPTER 4 QUESTIONS
 QUESTION 1

1. With tachistoscopic presentation, people often make recognition

errors. The errors are not random, however, but instead
“overregularize” the input to make it follow the rules of spelling.
This is because:

a. People consciously “adjust” their responses to make the

responses more sensible
b. All humans are genetically predisposed toward the visual
configurations evident in “regular” bigrams; this is why English
uses them
c. Of a lifetime of strengthening the bigram detectors for common
English letter pairs
d. People are reluctant to give answers that they cannot easily
pronounce

85
 QUESTION 1: ANSWER

1. With tachistoscopic presentation, people often make recognition

errors. The errors are not random, however, but instead
“overregularize” the input to make it follow the rules of spelling.
This is because:

a. People consciously “adjust” their responses to make the

responses more sensible
b. All humans are genetically predisposed toward the visual
configurations evident in “regular” bigrams; this is why English
uses them
c. Of a lifetime of strengthening the bigram detectors for common
English letter pairs
d. People are reluctant to give answers that they cannot easily
pronounce

86
 QUESTION 2

2. The use of geons is associated with:

a. The recognition-by-components (RBC) model

b. The word superiority effect
c. Visual masking
d. Feature nets

87
 QUESTION 2: ANSWER

2. The use of geons is associated with:

a. The recognition-by-components (RBC) model

b. The word superiority effect
c. Visual masking
d. Feature nets

88
 QUESTION 3

3. The “recognition-via-multiple views” approach to object

recognition is associated with claims about ___ cognition?

a. Viewpoint-dependent
b. Viewpoint-independent
c. Object
d. Face

89
 QUESTION 3: ANSWER

3. The “recognition-via-multiple views” approach to object

recognition is associated with claims about ___ cognition?

a. Viewpoint-dependent
b. Viewpoint-independent
c. Object
d. Face

90
 QUESTION 4

4. A participant reads a list of words in which the word

”platypus" appears several times. Later, the participant
views another list of words, and needs to rapidly judge
whether each stimulus is a real word or nonsense word.
When the word "platypus" appears in the second list, the
participant's response rate will be __________ than for other
words not found on the previous list. This effect is called
_________.

a. Faster; repetition priming

b. Slower; repetition priming
c. Faster; the word superiority effect
d. Slower; the word superiority effect

91
 QUESTION 4: ANSWER

4. A participant reads a list of words in which the word

”platypus" appears several times. Later, the participant
views another list of words, and needs to rapidly judge
whether each stimulus is a real word or nonsense word.
When the word "platypus" appears in the second list, the
participant's response rate will be __________ than for other
words not found on the previous list. This effect is called
_________.

a. Faster; repetition priming

b. Slower; repetition priming
c. Faster; the word superiority effect
d. Slower; the word superiority effect

92
 QUESTION 5

5. When handed an everyday object like a flashlight, Kate can

describe its features (e.g. shape, color, texture) but cannot
name it, despite having encountered it many times before.
She is likely suffering from:

a. Apperceptive agnosia
b. Integrative agnosia
c. Prosopagnosia
d. Associative agnosia

93
 QUESTION 5: ANSWER

5. When handed an everyday object like a flashlight, Kate can

describe its features (e.g. shape, color, texture) but cannot
name it, despite having encountered it many times before.
She is likely suffering from:

a. Apperceptive agnosia
b. Integrative agnosia
c. Prosopagnosia
d. Associative agnosia

94
 QUESTION 6

6. Which of the following is true of the recognition-by-

components (RBC) model?

a. Recognition accuracy is viewpoint-independent

b. Recognition accuracy is viewpoint-dependent
c. Recognition speed is viewpoint-independent, but recognition
accuracy is viewpoint-dependent
d. The degree of viewpoint dependence depends on the familiarity
of the target object

95
 QUESTION 6: ANSWER

6. Which of the following is true of the recognition-by-

components (RBC) model?

a. Recognition accuracy is viewpoint-independent

b. Recognition accuracy is viewpoint-dependent
c. Recognition speed is viewpoint-independent, but recognition
accuracy is viewpoint-dependent
d. The degree of viewpoint dependence depends on the familiarity
of the target object

96
 QUESTION 7

7. The word superiority effect refers to the fact that it is easier

to recognize:

a. Words in one's native language than words in other languages

b. A word presented in a phrase than a word presented by itself
c. Words that are frequently used under tachistoscopic conditions
d. A letter within the context of a word than a letter presented by
itself

97
 QUESTION 7: ANSWER

7. The word superiority effect refers to the fact that it is easier

to recognize:

a. Words in one's native language than words in other languages

b. A word presented in a phrase than a word presented by itself
c. Words that are frequently used under tachistoscopic conditions
d. A letter within the context of a word than a letter presented by
itself

98