Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Most models of object recognition assume that shape is the primary dimension of recognition and that color and texture play only a secondary role. One reason for this could be that color and texture are generally less diagnostic for recognition and so it would be comparatively more difficult to find evidence of their usage. Another, but as yet unexplored reason for their secondary role, is that color and texture differences are not as well perceived at short exposures of stimuli. We report two experiments that address the perception (as opposed to the usage) of dimensions over the time course of visual processing.