Interaction of scale and time during object identification

On each trial a target object and a fragment of the target (or a control stimulus) were presented briefly enough to be integrated together. The stimuli were masked, and identification accuracy was measured. The fragments were large or small in size scale, and were presented early in processing (fragment before target) or late in processing (fragment after target). When presented early, large-scale fragments tended to facilitate identification more than small-scale fragments, but when presented late, small-scale fragments facilitated more than large-scale fragments. Facilitation effects from common feature fragments supported the idea of a spatiotemporal dependency, in which the efficiency of processing a piece of information depends on other pieces of information that have been processed. This is a strong type of global-to-local processing and can be interpreted within a structural description framework.