Global precedence in visual pattern recognition

Abstract

This paper describes the results of three experiments on the global precedence effect, using stimuli derived from the receptive field characteristics of neurons in the visual cortex. Thus, the local cue consists of oriented line segments whose sizes correspond to the average size of the central portion of receptive fields in parafoveal representations of the macaque primary visual cortex. The global cue comprises these line segments distributed within larger rectangular clusters. The first experiment showed that global precedence is obtained when the relative visibility of the local and global cues is specifically evaluated and found to be comparable. In the second experiment, variants of the Garner sorting task produced results indicating that global processing is largely independent of local cues, but that local processing depends heavily on the status of task-irrelevant global cues. These asymmetric interactions are consistent with the notion of a priority for processing global cues. The third experiment demonstrated that the magnitude of global precedence is inversely related to pattern luminance. This latter finding is interpreted, in the context of Sternberg's additive factors logic (1969), as indicating that this priority for global feature processing is at least partially attributable to aspects of early visual processes. © 1984 Psychonomic Society, Inc.