Recognising, Knowing and Naming: Can Object Picture Processing Models Accommodate Non-Picture Visuals?

摘要

This paper provides an overview of information processing accounts of pictures of objects and of non-picture visuals (NPVs) such as graphs and diagrams, including theories of graph comprehension. Compared to the study of objects, there appear to be rather few information processing studies of NPVs. An NPV corpus was developed and items were used as visual stimuli in four cognitive tasks. The tasks assessed perceptual level processing (NPV recognition), semantic knowledge and lexical production (naming). The results are discussed in relation to several questions: How well do models of object picture processing accommodate the findings from this study of NPV processing? To what extent can NPVs be considered to be another class of object pictures? Are well-established phenomena in the visual object domain such as frequency and age of acquisition effects observed for NPVs? How do patterns of performance on the perceptual, semantic and naming tasks differ across NPV item sub-classes? The results show that performance patterns across a range of cognitive tasks utilizing NPV stimuli are - to some degree - similar to those seen in object picture processing. Age of acquisition effects were also observed. It is concluded that the use of experimental paradigms from studies of object picture processing are useful for understanding how people understand and use non-pictorial graphical representations such as diagrams.