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Abstract
Object memories activated by borders serve as priors for figure assignment: figures are more likely to be perceived on the side of a border where a well-known object is sketched. Do object memories also affect the appearance of object borders? Memories represent past experience with objects; memories of well-known objects include many with sharp borders because they are often fixated. We investigated whether object memories affect appearance by testing whether blurry borders appear sharper when they are contours of well-known objects versus matched novel objects. Participants viewed blurry versions of one familiar and one novel stimulus simultaneously for 180 ms; then made comparative (Exp. 1) or equality judgments regarding perceived blur (Exps. 2–4). For equivalent levels of blur, the borders of well-known objects appeared sharper than those of novel objects. These results extend evidence for the influence of past experience to object appearance, consistent with dynamic interactive models of perception.
Highlights
Object memories activated by borders serve as priors for figure assignment: figures are more likely to be perceived on the side of a border where a well-known object is sketched
Blur detection thresholds have been shown to be unaffected by manipulations of attention via cognitive load[17], but a previous study suggests that the appearance of blur is affected by past experience[15]: In order to match the apparent blur of a real word, a comparison pseudo-word had to be sharper
We report six experiments investigating whether the integration of memory representations with sensory input can sharpen the appearance of blurry borders of a well-known object versus a matched novel object when both objects were briefly presented simultaneously, eliminating the possibility of differential accommodation for the two types of stimuli
Summary
Object memories activated by borders serve as priors for figure assignment: figures are more likely to be perceived on the side of a border where a well-known object is sketched. For equivalent levels of blur, the borders of well-known objects appeared sharper than those of novel objects These results extend evidence for the influence of past experience to object appearance, consistent with dynamic interactive models of perception. If percepts are generated by combining bottom-up input with higher-level object memories activated by a stimulus, for a given level of blur, the borders of familiar objects should appear sharper than those of novel objects. We tested this hypothesis and examined whether predictions generated from a word prime can sharpen the perception of the blurry borders of a well-known object. We used a masked prime to attempt to manipulate expectations before the silhouettes appeared
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