VISUAL PRIMING AND THEORIES OF OBJECT RECOGNITION

In this paper, we approach the researches dealing with direct perceptive priming (and more particularly objects priming) by attempting to establish theoritical connections between the two fields of visual recognition and implicit memory. Our purpose is to better circumbscribe the core of perceptive priming by describing the cognitive processings necessary to both the perceptive elaboration of images and their subsequent identification resulting from matching operations with mnemonic traces. The first part provides a brief account of the mechanisms and concepts utilised in visual recognition, whereas the second part reviews several recent studies dedicated to perceptive priming of objects. Theoritical assumptions from the different authors are discussed into the light of data from studies of vision. Finally, and still resting on the foregoing arguments, we propose a synthetical account of perceptive priming.