Year: 2007
Type: article
Abstract: Familiar objects are more easily processed than unfamiliar ob-jects. Familiar objects are also generally meaningful, and comprise members of named categories. Previous work exam-ining familiarity effects in visual processing has confounded perceptual experience with meaningfulness and with name-ability. The present experiments use the visual search para-digm to (1) manipulate category membership while control-ling for novelty and perceptual similarity, and (2) investigate the role of on-line linguistic labels on visual perception. Search performance is dramatically improved when partici-pants are simply told to think of novel stimuli as members of a familiar category. Search performance is further improved when targets or distractors are named compared to trials on which target and distractor identity is known, but the stimuli are not verbally labeled.
Author: Gary Lupyan
Institution: Carnegie Mellon University
Language: English
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2586103564