Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A central issue in the development of models of context effects, such as the interactive activation model, concerns the relationship between contextual and stimulus information. Empirical evidence regarding perception of spoken and printed words indicates that context and stimulus information make independent contributions to perceptual identification. Recent research on visual object recognition, however, suggests that context may have a direct influence on the rate or accuracy of visual analysis. These results imply that contextual influences in language comprehension and object recognition may operate in fundamentally different ways. A series of experiments is described that lead to a reinterpretation of the object recognition results. It is concluded that contextual information contributes to the interpretation of stimulus input without altering its form or the rate of its acquisition.