Abstract

The speed and accuracy of perceptual recognition of a briefly presented picture of an object is facilitated by its prior presentation. Picture priming tasks were used to assess whether the facilitation is a function of the repetition of: (a) the object’s image features (viz., vertices and edges), (b) the object model (e.g., that it is a grand piano), or(c) a representation intermediate between (a) and (b) consisting of convex or singly concave components of the object, roughly corresponding to the object’s parts. Subjects viewed pictures with half their contour removed by de-leting either (a) every other image feature from each part, or (b) half the compo-nents. On a second (primed) block of trials, subjects saw: (a) the identical image that they viewed on the first block, (b) the complement which had the missing contours, or (c) a same name-different exemplar of the object class (e.g., a grand piano when an upright piano had been shown on the lirst block). With deletion of reatures, speed and accuracy of naming identical and complementary images were equivalent, indicating that none of the priming could be attributed to the features actually present in the image. Performance with both types of image enjoyed an