IS OBJECT RECOGNITION AUTOMATIC

A new paradigm is proposed that involves a simple judgment on an objec t's perceptual feature that is independent of object identity. Subject s were required to categorize as vertical or horizontal the main axis of elongation of an object picture. Both fake and real-world objects w ere presented, and a graphical manipulation was applied to their shape s so that the canonical elongation of the real-world objects was incon gruent with the elongation of their shapes after the manipulation. The results showed an influence of the identity of the objects on the per ceptual task in the form of a cost in judging the elongation of the in congruent real-world objects. The results are taken as evidence for au tomatic activation of objects' stored representations. A ''horse-race' ' model of the influence of these representations on the perceptual ta sk is proposed in the final section of the article.