The role of local and global properties in comparison of analogical visual scenes.

Love, Rouder, and Wisniewski (1999) obtained interesting results showing that, in a same/different task on abstract visual scenes, subjects were able to process global properties quickly, even before local properties were identified. Our aim in this work is to explore more fully the complex relationships that exist between local processing and global processing. In our first experiment, we tested the robustness and generality of these global and local effects by using another, very different kind of local element. We showed that the global effects remain strong even when the local elements are neither conventional nor easily discriminable. In the second experiment, we showed that there exists an intermediate level of similarity between purely local and purely global similarity. Furthermore, we found that even when a stronger form of local dissimilarity is manipulated (through the introduction of different local elements), global effects were still observed. We conclude with a discussion of the respective roles of global and local properties in light of our findings.