Bria Long

Harvard Vision Lab

Real-world size is reflected in mid-level shape features: Evidence from visual search

 

Real-world size is a core feature of object representations: It is accessed automatically when we see an object and is predictive of a consistent medial-to-lateral organization in ventral temporal cortex (Konkle & Oliva, 2012). Is real-world size a purely abstract concept or a conceptual distinction that cashes out in perceptual differences? We use visual search to address this question: If big and small objects tend to be perceptually different from each other, it should be easier to find an object among distractors with a different (vs. same) real-world size than the object. Even when stimuli were controlled for a wide range of low level visual features, participants spent significantly less time searching for the target when distractors had a different real-world size than the target. This effect persisted when stimuli were rendered unrecognizable but mid-level shape features were preserved. These results suggest that certain broad categorical distinctions may correlate with mid-level shape features.