Thematic object pairs produce stronger and faster grouping than taxonomic pairs

Studies of visual object processing have long appreciated that semantic meaning is automatically extracted. However, “semantics” has largely been defined as a unitary concept that describes all meaning-based information. In contrast, the concept literature divides semantics into taxonomic and thematic types. Taxonomic relationships reflect categorization by similarities (e.g., dog – wolf); thematic groups are based on complementary relationships (e.g., swimsuit – goggles). Critically, thematic relationships are learned from the experienced co-occurrence of objects whereas taxonomic relationships are based on shared structural similarities. In two studies with adults (N=66 Experiment 1; N=44 Experiment 2), we test whether visual processing of thematic objects is more rapid because they form a perceptual unit and serve as mutual visual primes. The results demonstrate that visual processing benefits between thematically related objects are earlier than taxonomic ones, revealing a link between how information is acquired (e.g., experienced vs. unobserved) and how it modulates perception.