The role of familiarity in the recognition of static and dynamic objects

Although the perception of our world is experienced as effortless, the processes that underlie object recognition in the brain are often difficult to determine. In this chapter, we review the effects of familiarity on the recognition of moving or static objects. In particular, we concentrate on exemplar-level stimuli such as walking humans, unfamiliar objects and faces. We found that the perception of these objects can be affected by their familiarity; for example the learned view of an object or the learned dynamic pattern can influence object perception. Deviations in the viewpoint from the familiar viewpoint, or changes in the temporal pattern of the objects can result in some reduction of efficiency in the perception of the object. Furthermore, more efficient sex categorization and crossmodal matching were found for familiar than for unfamiliar faces. In sum, we find that our perceptual system is organized around familiar events and that perception is most efficient with these learned events.