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Object identification is driven, in part, by the extent to which we have sensorimotor experience with the object. Importantly, the activation of embodied object representations depends on contextual information. In the present study, we use a visual masking paradigm to investigate how the availability of visual information modulates the role of manipulability in the representation of object concepts. Using both an object naming task (i.e., linguistic response) and a picture-word matching task (i.e., manual response), we provide evidence that structural manipulability (the ability to pick up an object with one hand) and functional manipulability (the action information that pertains to the ultimate use of the object) have dissociable effects on object identification. In both tasks, the effects of structural manipulability were greater when structural information was available in the image (i.e., when the objects were unmasked); in contrast, the effects of functional manipulability were greater when the objects were masked. Importantly, these effects were not due to object familiarity or the age at which the name of the objects was acquired. Our results are consistent with the activation of the two pathways within the dorsal visual stream that are part of a distributed neural network that represents embodied action information. We extend previous research by showing that visual information determines which type of embodied information drives object identification. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

A large body of research suggests that faces are processed by a specialized mechanism within the human visual system. This specialized mechanism is made up of subprocesses (Maurer, LeGrand, & Mondloch, 2002). One subprocess, called second- order relational processing, analyzes the metric distances between face parts. Importantly, it is well established that other-race faces and contrast-reversed faces are associated with impaired performance on numerous face processing tasks. Here, we investigated the specificity of second-order relational processing by testing how this process is applied to faces of different race and photographic contrast. Participants completed a feature displacement discrimination task, directly measuring the sensitivity to second-order relations between face parts. Across three experiments we show that, despite absolute differences in sensitivity in some conditions, inversion impaired performance in all conditions. The presence of robust inversion effects for all faces suggests that second-order relational processing can be applied to faces of different race and photographic contrast.

We investigated here the detection of 2nd-order configural relations both in faces and in non-face objects. In experiment 1 it was shown that observers were more sensitive to feature displacements in upright faces and houses than in inverted faces and houses. The presence of an inversion effect in the house stimuli suggested that 2nd-order relational processing was applied to the non-face stimuli. In experiment 2, the inversion effect for houses was absent when only houses were presented. In experiment 3, face and house stimuli were once again presented in the same task and inversion effects were again seen for both types of stimuli. Together, these results suggest that 2nd-order relational processing can be flexibly applied to non-face objects when they are presented in the context of faces.