The influence of category knowledge on visual recognition and its functional role

Abstract

Knowledge and experience that a viewing subject possesses about an object plays a significant role in human visual recognition. In this paper we conduct psychological experiments to investigate how a subject's recognition of objects changes as the subject acquires knowledge of the category to which it belongs. In these experiments we investigated how a subject's similarity judgments with respect to different typical stimuli within a given category varied before and after category knowledge was acquired. The results of these experiments show that in many cases the acquisition of category knowledge has the effect of increasing the similarity between different patterns and in particular we are able to conclude that this effect is strong for objects that are highly typical of a category. From these results we suggest that category knowledge works to emphasize features that are strongly tied to the category knowledge. In addition, we used a computational model to conduct a simulation of the process by which category knowledge emphasizes features in a top-down manner and were able to accurately re-create the results of the psychological experiments. From these results we suggest that in human visual recognition, category knowledge plays a functional role by which features of a given object are inferred in a top-down manner from the given knowledge. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn Pt 3, 88(11): 43–55, 2005; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ecjc.20200