Animal recognition and eye movements: the contribution of outline contour and local feature information

We assessed the importance of outline contour and individual features in mediating the recognition of animals by examining response times and eye movements in an animal-object decision task (i.e., deciding whether or not an object was an animal that may be encountered in real life). There were shorter latencies for animals as compared with nonanimals and performance was similar for shaded line drawings and silhouettes, suggesting that important information for recognition lies in the outline contour. The most salient information in the outline contour was around the head, followed by the lower torso and leg regions. We also observed effects of object orientation and argue that the usefulness of the head and lower torso/leg regions is consistent with a role for the object axis in recognition.