Yee, E. 1 , Huffstetler, S. 2 & Thompson-Schill, S. 2
1 Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language
2 University of Pennsylvania
When looking at an object (e.g., pizza), we become aware of not only what it looks like, in its current instantiation (a reddish triangular slice, let’s say), but also what other forms that object can take (e.g., round), and what it is used for (food). We describe several eye tracking studies that demonstrate that when searching for a named object, non-visible shape and function properties can guide visual attention - with different kinds of knowledge influencing visual attention at different times. Participants viewed multi-object displays and clicked on the picture corresponding to a heard word. In critical trials, the conceptual representation of one of the objects in the display was similar in shape, color, or function to the heard word. Importantly, this similarity was not apparent in the visual depictions (e.g. for the target “frisbee”, the shape-related object was a triangular slice of pizza - a shape that a frisbee cannot take); preferential fixations on the related object were therefore attributable to activation of the conceptual representations on the relevant features. Shape-, color-, and function- related objects were preferentially fixated, but function effects occurred later than shape and color. These findings show that visual object recognition is a dynamically unfolding process in which function follows form, and that when searching for a named object, visual attention is influenced by top-down conceptual knowledge about the properties of other objects in the scene.