The Impact of Attentional, Linguistic and Visual Features during Object Naming

Alasdair Clarke, Moreno Coco, Frank Keller

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Object detection and identification are fundamental to human vision, and there is mounting evidence that objects guide the allocation of visual attention. However, the role of objects in tasks involving multiple modalities is less clear. To address this question, we investigate object naming, a task in which participants have to verbally identify objects they see in photorealistic scenes. We report an eye-tracking study that investigates which features (attentional, visual, and linguistic) influence object naming. We need that the amount of visual attention directed towards an object, its position and saliency, along with linguistic factors such as word frequency, animacy, and semantic proximity, significantly influence whether the object will be named or not. We then ask how features from different modalities are combined during naming, and significant interactions between saliency and position, saliency and linguistic features,
and attention and position. We conclude that when the cognitive system
performs tasks such as object naming, it uses input from one modality
to constraint or enhance the processing of other modalities, rather than
processing each input modality independently.
Original languageEnglish
Article number927
Number of pages27
JournalFrontiers in Psychology
Volume4
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 13 Dec 2013

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