Interaction of scale and time during object identification

On each trial a target object and a fragment of the target (or a control st imulus) were presented briefly enough to be integrated together. The stimul i were masked, and identification accuracy was measured. The fragments were large or small in size scale, and were presented early in processing (frag ment before target) or late in processing (fragment after target). When pre sented early, large-scale fragments tended to facilitate identification mor e than small-scale fragments, but when presented late, small-scale fragment s facilitated more than large-scale fragments. Facilitation effects from co mmon feature fragments supported the idea of a spatiotemporal dependency, i n which the efficiency of processing a piece of information depends on othe r pieces of information that have been processed. This is a strong type of global-to-local processing and can be interpreted within a structural descr iption framework.