There are always going to be exceptions that just “work” for your brain. I have a person in my card list for 0701 that is mapped to “Sky Seat.” Its a guy in a folding beach chair that has hundreds of balloons tied to it and he’s floating high in the air. Even though this is a VERY object-centric image, I have no trouble reading it as a person. The “object” for 0701 is a SCSI Drive, a smoking overworked old hard drive.
Thing is, I have a bunch of balloons as an image for another card pair, and I have a beach chair as another… I never confuse the sky seat guy with either of those or have a concern that I may accidentally combine or compound an image to a point of missing it.
For your thief / lockpick situation, I think the brain does something when you intentionally designate a specific object as “THE” object in the scene and it allows you to disregard “incidental” similar objects. This is especially the case when you have a strict element limit per loci. If you have a person and an object as your scene, you’ll know that the thief using their lockpick on something means that the elements are thief and the something. The lockpick gets filtered out as incidental. If you have the thief twirling a giant lockpick like a baton and nothing else in your scene, clearly the object is the lockpick. I think it all depends on the emphasis you place on actively focusing on the representational elements when you build your scene.
On a similar note, I have an animal as my “person” for H29 (a king pair in shadow phonetics.) It’s a HoNey Badger, like just the regular animal version of it. But for some reason, I read it as a person. All of my other “generic animals” are “objects.” A fox. A manta ray. A bear. A cat. Etc… for some reason my brain associates the honey badger as being a person and the phonetics always trigger it’s image. (The “object” for H29 is a honey pot in the style of winnie the pooh.)
I think your brain sometimes just really really wants to make a certain image associate with certain sounds or words or whatever and its just fine to use it. I don’t think I’ve ever blanked or misrecalled honey badger or sky seat yet.