Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This research addresses the generation of meaningful interpretations of real-world perceptual stimuli. Accordingto a widespread framework we will call the features-first view, a stimulus is initially encoded via semantically-laden, symbol-like properties that are compared to stored category representations to find the best match. Alternative theoretical perspectiveschallenge the features-first view, but there has been no direct empirical test. In our experiment, participants were shownphotographic images of everyday objects and asked to judge as quickly as possible whether a provided verbal descriptivematched the picture. We tested different levels of delay between image and descriptive and found evidence that basic-levelcategory labels were verified faster than clearly manifested descriptions of physical or functional properties. Accordingly,people know the category of the stimulus before knowing its semantic properties. The present evidence suggests that thecategory is used to achieve a property-level description of the meaning of the stimulus, not vice-versa.