Visual object detection, categorization, and identification tasks are associated with different time courses and sensitivities

Recent evidence suggests that the recognition of an object's presence and its explicit recognition are temporally closely related. Here we re-examined the time course (using a fine and a coarse temporal resolution) and the sensitivity of three possible component processes of visual object recognition. In particular, participants saw briefly presented (Experiment I to III) or noise masked (Experiment IV) static images of objects and non-object textures. Participants reported the presence of an object, its basic level category, and its subordinate category while we measured recognition performance by means of accuracy and reaction times. All three recognition tasks were clearly separable in terms of their time course and sensitivity. Finally, the use of a coarser temporal sampling of presentation times decreased performance differences between the detection and basic level categorization task suggesting that a fine temporal sampling for the dissociation of recognition performances is important. Overall the three probed recognition processes were associated with different time courses and sensitivities.