Components of Picture Naming

摘要

Additive factors methodology was used to study the componential structure of high-level visual processes. Subjects either named pictures of common objects or decided whether words named pictures; response times and error rates were recorded. The pictures were manipulated in ways that were thought to selectively affect distinct processing stages or that were thought to affect the same processing stage. For example, spurious parts were added, which should have affected matching in associative memory, and random line segments were placed over the picture, which should have affected relatively early feature extraction processes. As expected, manipulations that should have affected different stages produced additive effects on response times, whereas manipulations that should have affected the same stage did not produce discrete increments of additional time.