Perceptual closure and object identification: Electrophysiological responses to incomplete pictures

doi:10.1016/0278-2626(92)90047-P

Brain and Cognition

Volume 19, Issue 2, July 1992, Pages 253-266

https://doi.org/10.1016/0278-2626(92)90047-P Get rights and content

Abstract

Event-related potentials were recorded during the naming of pictures of concrete objects. The pictures were presented at three levels of completeness: 10, 30, and 60%. The ERP waveforms were evaluated according to the level of picture completeness and the correctness of naming. A negative wave in the latency range of 250–550 ms was significantly more negative when the pictures were more incomplete, regardless of the correctness of response. This N400 wave is proposed as being related to hypotheses about the identity of the object. A late positive wave in the latency range of 550–650 ms followed the negativity, but only when the response was correct. This may reflect the subject's certainty about the perceptual analysis, a verification of the identity of the object. A slow parietal negativity lasting up to 2 sec was largest for the least complete picture. This therefore varied with the perceptual difficulty.

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Without contextual information, guesses depend solely on how recognizable the object is. The brain responses thought to reflect those guesses, or what Stuss et al. (1992) called the generation of hypotheses of an object's identity, are reflected by more negative ERPs in time windows of 250–350 ms and 350–450 ms (Doniger et al., 2001; Stuss et al., 1992). This effect was demonstrated by using fragmented images that, at a certain level of fragmentation, became unrecognizable.
We are used to seeing objects in specific settings, and in association with other related objects. This contextual information allows for fast and efficient object recognition and influences brain-related processes. The influence of scene context has been studied using event-related potentials (ERPs) in order to further our understanding of the underlying brain mechanisms. Current ERP studies have focused on effects related to the incongruity between unambiguous objects and their scenes, rather than the specific influence of a congruent scene. The present study sought to examine ERPs associated with the beneficial influence of scene context on object recognition. This influence was examined using ambiguous objects that required a congruent scene in order to be recognized, as well as unambiguous objects, to determine whether scene processing occurs even when it is unnecessary for recognizing the object. Twenty healthy subjects were instructed to indicate whether they recognized, had a vague idea, or did not recognize target objects that appeared within congruent and neutral scenes. ERPs from 250 to 1000 ms, including the N300 and N400, were more positive at anterior sites and more negative at posterior sites, when objects appeared in congruent scenes as opposed to when they appeared in neutral scenes, with a larger effect seen for ambiguous objects. Upon further examination, the results showed that the ERPs to ambiguous objects became similar to those of unambiguous objects when they appeared in congruent contexts. These findings indicated that a congruent context exerted its influence by reducing the ambiguity of objects.
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An additional effect, which reflects semantic knowledge integration and/or retrieval is the N400 effect, which was initially related to words that are semantically unrelated or unusual in a given semantic sentence context (Kutas & Hillyard, 1980a, 1980b). The N400 component is characterized by a negativity peaking around 400 ms after stimulus onset (Barrett & Rugg, 1990; Ganis, Kutas, & Sereno, 1996; Hamm, Johnson, & Kirk, 2002; Holcomb & McPherson, 1994; McPherson & Holcomb, 1999; Nigam, Hoffman, & Simons, 1992; Pietrowsky et al., 1996; Pratarelli, 1994; Stuss et al., 1992) and was first described for pictures by Barrett and Rugg (1990). Barrett and Rugg (1990) reported that pictures that were semantically unrelated to a previous priming stimulus elicit a greater negative ERP component around 400 ms after stimulus onset, as compared to pictures that were semantically related to a previous primer.
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Taking a different approach, Viggiano and Kutas (1998), Viggiano and Kutas (2000) compared the ERPs evoked at the identification level with those at one higher level with more fragments added to the stimulus. Consistent with the results of Stuss and colleagues (Stuss et al., 1992), the amplitude was more negative for the identification level, thus for the most fragmented level. The authors mentioned that this effect was restricted to posterior sites, but the electrodes, as well as the latencies, were not specified more precisely.
The present study was carried out to examine how the event-related potentials to fragmentation predict recognition success. Stimuli were abstract meaningless figures that were either complete or fragmented to various extents but still recoverable. Stimuli were first encoded as part of a symmetry discrimination task. In a subsequent recognition phase, encoded stimuli were presented complete along with never presented stimuli and participants performed an old/new discrimination task. Fragmentation stimuli elicited more negative ERPs than complete figures over the frontal, central and parietal areas between 180 and 260 ms, and over the occipito-temporal areas between 220 and 340 ms. Only this latter effect was modulated as a function of whether stimuli were recognized or not during the recognition phase of the memory test. More specifically, the effect occurred for stimuli that were later forgotten and was absent for stimuli that were later recognized. This ERP to fragmentation, the occipito-temporal N_frag, possibly reflects the brain response to encoding difficulty, and is thus predictive of recognition performance.
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The timing of activating memory about visual objects is important for theories of human cognition but largely unknown, especially for tasks like entry level categorization that activate semantic memory. We tested an implicit memory-categorization “equivalence” hypothesis of multiple memory systems theory that a cortical system that stores structural knowledge to support entry level categorization also stores long-term, perceptual implicit memory, resulting in priming of this knowledge. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded to impoverished pictures of new and repeated objects that were similar in perceptual properties but differed in categorization success. The cortical dynamics of object knowledge were defined using categorization ratings and naming. As predicted, rating, naming, and repetition effects on a frontocentral N350 show that implicit memory modifies the object knowledge network supporting categorization. This ERP is a complex of components between 200 and 500 ms indexing temporally overlapping substates from more perceptual to more conceptual knowledge. A frontopolar N350 subcomponent defines the first substate of a process of object model selection from occipitotemporal cortex based on shape similarity, and indicates that implicit memory in this system is greater with better categorization success. Afterwards, parietal positivity and a slow wave index secondary, post-model selection processes, like evaluating the success of a decision or memory match, and working memory for overt report, respectively. Altogether, ERP findings support the equivalence hypothesis and a two-state interactive account of visual object knowledge, and delineate the timing of multiple memory systems.
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There is an ongoing controversy regarding the role of gender in modulating components of the human visual-evoked potential (VEP) and event-related potentials (ERPs). Our aim was to further characterize the role of gender on VEPs, ERPs and response performance in an object recognition task. We recorded VEPs and reaction time (RT) in a paradigm wherein subjects responded to a randomly presented “Relevant” stimulus, and did not respond when presented with “Irrelevant” or “Standard” visual stimuli. There was no effect of gender on early components of the VEP or RT to Relevant stimuli. Relevant and Irrelevant stimuli evoked distinct VEP components including the P300, N400 and late-positive (LP) ERPs that were well-discriminated from those of the Standard stimulus. Females were characterized by greater P300 and N400 responses than males for the Relevant stimulus, but exclusively greater N400 responses for the Irrelevant stimulus. There were no significant gender differences for the LP, or for the latency of any ERP component. Gender differences were not attributed to hemispheric asymmetry, as there were no significant differences in P300 and N400 VEP amplitudes between lateral occipital or parietal electrode positions. These results indicate that the N400 can be elicited in a task requiring the processing of irrelevant, but not unexpected, stimuli and that females process visual information differently than males, perhaps by increased allocation of attentional resources to distracting stimuli.
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Classic identity negative priming (NP) refers to the finding that when an object is ignored, subsequent naming responses to it are slower than when it has not been previously ignored (Tipper, S.P., 1985. The negative priming effect: inhibitory priming by ignored objects. Q. J. Exp. Psychol. 37A, 571–590). It is unclear whether this phenomenon arises due to the involvement of abstract semantic representations that the ignored object accesses automatically. Contemporary connectionist models propose a key role for the anterior temporal cortex in the representation of abstract semantic knowledge (e.g., McClelland, J.L., Rogers, T.T., 2003. The parallel distributed processing approach to semantic cognition. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 4, 310–322), suggesting that this region should be involved during performance of the classic identity NP task if it involves semantic access. Using high-field (4 T) event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging, we observed increased BOLD responses in the left anterolateral temporal cortex including the temporal pole that was directly related to the magnitude of each individual’s NP effect, supporting a semantic locus. Additional signal increases were observed in the supplementary eye fields (SEF) and left inferior parietal lobule (IPL).

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^☆: The Medical Research Council of Canada and the Ontario Mental Health Foundation funded the research reported in this paper.

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Perceptual closure and object identification: Electrophysiological responses to incomplete pictures☆

Abstract

Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology

Biological Psychology

Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology

Cognitive Psychology

Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology

Physiology and Behavior

Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology

Journal of Memory and Language

Acta Psychologica

Brain and Cognition

Brain and Language

Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology

Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology

Behavioral Biology

Brain and Language

Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology

Cognitive mode and asymmetry in cerebral functioning

Cortex

Surprise! … Surprise?

Psychophysiology

Brain activity underlying mental imagery: Event-related potentials during mental image generation

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

Brain potentials related to stages of sentence verification

Psychophysiology

Hippocampal field-potentials evoked by repeated vs. nonrepeated words