Connecting the dots without top-down knowledge: Evidence for rapidly-learned low-level associations that are independent of object identity.

ABSTRACT: Knowing the identity of an object can powerfully alter perception. Visual demonstrations of this-such as Gregory's (1970) hidden Dalmatian-affirm the existence of both top-down and bottom-up processing. We consider a third processing pathway: lateral connections between the parts of an object. Lateral associations are assumed by theories of object processing and hierarchical theories of memory, but little evidence attests to them. If they exist, their effects should be observable even in the absence of object identity knowledge. We employed Continuous Flash Suppression (CFS) while participants studied object images, such that visual details were learned without explicit object identification. At test, lateral associations were probed using a part-to-part matching task. We also tested wheth

SUBMITTER: Sadil P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6759832 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature