Automatic priming for translation- and scale-invariant representations of object shape

Abstract

Attended objects visually prime both themselves and their left-right reflections, whereas ignored objects prime themselves but not their left-right reflections (Stankiewicz, Hummel, & Cooper, 1998). Two experiments extended this research by investigating the role of attention in priming across changes in size and location in the visual field. Experiment 1 showed that visual priming for both attended and ignored images is invariant with translation across the visual field. Experiment 2 showed that visual priming for both attended and ignored images is invariant with scale. In combination with the findings of Stankiewicz et al., these findings support the hypothesis that object recognition is based on a hybrid representation of shape.