Is object recognition automatic?

A new paradigm is proposed that involves a simple judgment on an object’s perceptual feature that is independent of object identity. Subjects were required to categorize as vertical or horizontal the main axis of elongation of an object picture. Both fake and real-world objects were presented, and a graphical manipulation was applied to their shapes so that the canonical elongation of the real-world objects was incongruent with the elongation of their shapes after the manipulation. The results showed an influence of the identity of the objects on the perceptual task in the form of a cost in judging the elongation of the incongruent real-world objects. The results are taken as evidence for automatic activation of objects’ stored representations. A “horse-race” model of the influence of these representations on the perceptual task is proposed in the final section of the article.