Visual priming and perception of small pictures in a scene with multiscale objects

Abstract

Biederman et al. [1, 2] have shown that the priming effect does not depend on the difference between the angular sizes of the test stimulus and the primer. However, these two and other similar studies investigated only a small range of the angular sizes of stimuli. Vakhrameeva et al. [3] have shown that there exist two perceptionally different size ranges: perception of the objects with an angular size varying between 1–1.5 and 50 degrees was found to be invariant, but for the objects whose angular size is less than 1–1.5 degrees, their perception is no longer invariant. In this study, the presence of the priming effect has been investigated in the match-to-sample task with such a difference in the angular sizes of the primer and test stimuli that the sizes of the primer (about 4 degrees) and the test stimulus (about 0.5 degrees) belonged to two different size ranges. The sample stimulus was presented with and without noise superposition. It has been shown that the priming effect is suppressed when the size difference between the primer and the test stimulus is large. A congruent primer can have a positive impact on the recognition of the test objects, but this occurs under the viewing conditions complicated by noise superposition.