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要旨

Objects in the real world do not occur in a random manner. For example tea spoons tend to be near tea cups and there is usually a remote control nearby a TV. A cognitive system, which is adapted to the environment, would take such co-occurrences into account and use top-down driven expectancies for faster recognition. Although many object recognition theories assume a serial bottom-up processing and disregard top-down feedback from later stages to earlier ones, neuropsychological and imaging studies suggest recurrent feedback during object identication (e.g., Humphreys, Riddoch and Price, 1997, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B, 1275-1282). We present further evidence for top-down in uences in object recognition using a priming approach. In Experiment 1 participants named objects (e.g., TV) in two dierent views (canonical vs. non-canonical), which were preceded by a contextually consistent (e.g., remote control) or inconsistent (e.g., hammer) priming stimulus. We found clear eects of prime consistency and target viewpoint as well as a signicant interaction. Presenting a consistent prime prior to a target reduced the viewpoint dependency signicantly. These results were replicated in Experiment 2 using a contextual association task. Participants had to judge whether the second of two sequentially presented objects tends to co-occur with the rst one. Consistent priming stimuli reduced the viewpoint-dependency of the reaction times to the target objects. Both experiments provided converging evidence for the view, that the human cognitive system uses knowledge of co-occurrence information for faster recognition.