Typicality and Object Reference

Does the typicality of an object affect how we identify it? When we produce initial reference to a visible object, we are influenced by a variety of factors, including what is visually salient (bottom-up influences) as well as our previous experiences with the object (top-down influences). In this study, we seek to understand how the top-down influence of typicality affects initial reference to an object. We use real world, everyday objects, and focus on the visual properties of SHAPE and MATERIAL. Our findings suggest that there is a tendency to select the atypical over the typical. But we have only begun to scratch the surface of understanding reference to real world objects. The annotated corpus from this study is made available for future research on modeling reference in visual domains.1