The Effect of Relative Size Consistency on Object Recognition
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2020-09-28
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en
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Abstract
Objects that frequently co-occur in the real-world appear to have canonical size relations. For
example, a milk carton should be twice the size of the glass next to it. Similarly, a chair next to
a table needs to be appropriately sized to form a functional group. Although the real-world size
of objects has been identified as an integral property of object processing and search, little is
known about how canonical size relations between objects influence recognition for
semantically congruent object groups. Here, we used electroencephalography (EEG) and
behavioural measures to test whether real-world size consistency between familiar object pairs
facilitates grouping and recognition. We constructed silhouette object pairs containing
semantically associated objects drawn from two possible real-world scale categories (eg., large
objects – desk and chair, small objects – a bottle and a glass). We perturbed size consistency
by rescaling one of the two items by 1:2 ratio. In Experiment 1 we validated the stimulus set
through behavioural testing. In Experiment 2 brain activity was recorded using EEG while
participants performed a one-back task during which size consistent and inconsistent targets
were viewed. We tested whether event related potential (ERP) magnitudes differed as a function
of size consistency. We found differences between mean amplitudes for size consistent and
inconsistent trials specific to scale category. That is, for targets that appear large in the realworld
responses significantly differ as a function of consistency earlier (P200) as opposed to
small targets (P300, P600). We further hypothesized that scene understanding, measured by
scale decodability, should be better for consistent as opposed to inconsistent pairs. However,
multivariate classification analysis found no evidence that those underlying representations
differ significantly.
Keywords: relative-size, size constancy, object recognition, visual cognition, EEG decoding
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Faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappen