Speed of Processing and Stimulus Complexity in Low-Frequency and High-Frequency Channels

Studies of the microgenesis of perception led to the hypothesis that global aspects of objects are processed faster than their details. If one starts with the assumption that low-frequency information of objects corresponds to the global, and high-frequency information to the local aspects, recognising objects should rely at first on information from the low-frequency channels and afterwards from that of the high-frequency channels. The priming paradigm provides a mean of investigating experimentally the temporal availability of low-frequency and high-frequency information in object perception. In the experiments subjects had to respond to target objects preceded either by related or by unrelated priming stimuli, which consisted of low-pass-filtered and high-pass-filtered versions of the objects. With the influence of stimulus complexity controlled, pictures of objects were chosen that varied in the number of intensity changes in the high-frequency components, with those of the low-frequency components kept constant. The exposure duration of each prime was varied between 40 and 100 ms. The results indicated that target identification only profits more from low-frequency than from high-frequency primes if the high-frequency information has a high level of complexity. If the number of intensity changes in the high-frequency components of the prime is low, target identification is most strongly facilitated. The results are discussed in terms of models which focus on organising principles at different scales.

[1]  J. Wolfe,et al.  The order of visual processing: “Top-down,” “bottom-up,” or “middle-out” , 1979, Perception & psychophysics.

[2]  J. Miller,et al.  Global precedence in attention and decision. , 1981, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[3]  G L Shulman,et al.  The Role of Spatial-Frequency Channels in the Perception of Local and Global Structure , 1986, Perception.

[4]  P. Merikle,et al.  Global precedence in attended and nonattended objects. , 1988, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[5]  J. R. Pomerantz.  Global and local precedence: selective attention in form and motion perception. , 1983, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[6]  G R Grice,et al.  Forest before trees? It depends where you look , 1983, Perception & psychophysics.

[7]  J. M. Foley,et al.  Contrast masking in human vision. , 1980, Journal of the Optical Society of America.

[8]  Gert Hauske,et al.  Perceptual latencies to sinusoidal gratings , 1976, Vision Research.

[9]  A. Oliva,et al.  Flexible, Diagnosticity-Driven, Rather Than Fixed, Perceptually Determined Scale Selection in Scene and Face Recognition , 1997, Perception.

[10]  J R Lishman,et al.  Temporal Integration of Spatially Filtered Visual Images , 1992, Perception.

[11]  A. Treisman.  Features and Objects: The Fourteenth Bartlett Memorial Lecture , 1988, The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology. A, Human experimental psychology.

[12]  Dennis M. Levi,et al.  Reaction time as a measure of suprathreshold grating detection , 1978, Vision Research.

[13]  L C Boer,et al.  Global precedence as a postperceptual effect: An analysis of speed-accuracy tradeoff functions , 1982, Perception & psychophysics.

[14]  A. Vassilev,et al.  Perception time and spatial frequency , 1976, Vision Research.

[15]  R Kimchi,et al.  The Role of Wholistic/Configural Properties versus Global Properties in Visual Form Perception , 1994, Perception.

[16]  J R Lishman,et al.  Role of coarse and fine spatial information in face and object processing. , 1996, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[17]  Arthur P. Ginsburg,et al.  Spatial filtering and visual form perception. , 1986 .

[18]  L. Lagasse,et al.  Effects of good form and spatial frequency on global precedence , 1993, Perception & psychophysics.

[19]  M R Lamb,et al.  Do response time advantage and interference reflect the order of processing of global- and local-level information? , 1989, Perception & psychophysics.

[20]  R. Watt.  Scanning from coarse to fine spatial scales in the human visual system after the onset of a stimulus. , 1987, Journal of the Optical Society of America. A, Optics and image science.

[21]  D. Navon.  Forest before trees: The precedence of global features in visual perception , 1977, Cognitive Psychology.

[22]  A. Oliva,et al.  From Blobs to Boundary Edges: Evidence for Time- and Spatial-Scale-Dependent Scene Recognition , 1994 .

[23]  Lawrence C. Sager,et al.  Perception of wholes and of their component parts: some configural superiority effects. , 1977, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.