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Abstract:
The ability to compensate for occluded or missing information
is a critical aspect of visual object recognition in everyday life.
We examined alternative explanations for this important ability in
repetition priming experiments. Participants named incomplete
objects presented in the left or right visual field, after viewing
centrally presented complements of the test-object exemplars or
different exemplars with the same names as the test-object
exemplars. In two experiments, same-exemplar complementary primed
recognition was more efficient overall than different-exemplar
primed recognition. In a third experiment, that difference was
observed when test objects were presented directly to the right
cerebral hemisphere but not when they were presented directly to
the left cerebral hemisphere. Results suggest that
specific-exemplar recognition is supported by a neural subsystem
that (a) activates representations of entire objects when
incomplete versions of those objects are presented as input and (b)
operates independently of another subsystem that may process only
visible features to recognize the abstract categories of incomplete
objects.
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