The influence of scene context on object recognition is independent of attentional focus (original) (raw)
Related papers
Does consistent scene context facilitate object perception?
Journal of Experimental Psychology-general, 1998
The conclusion that scene knowledge interacts with object perception depends on evidence that object detection is facilitated by consistent scene context. Experiment 1 replicated the I. Biederman, R. J. Mezzanotte, and J. C. Rabinowitz (1982) object-detection paradigm. Detection performance was higher for semantically consistent versus inconsistent objects. However, when the paradigm was modified to control for response bias (Experiments 2 and 3) or when response bias was eliminated by means of a forced-choice procedure (Experiment 4), no such advantage obtained. When an additional source of biasing information was eliminated by presenting the object label after the scene (Experiments 3 and 4), there was either no effect of consistency (Experiment 4) or an inconsistent object advantage (Experiment 3). These results suggest that object perception is not facilitated by consistent scene context.
The roles of scene priming and location priming in object-scene consistency effects
Frontiers in Psychology, 2014
Presenting consistent objects in scenes facilitates object recognition as compared to inconsistent objects. Yet the mechanisms by which scenes influence object recognition are still not understood. According to one theory, consistent scenes facilitate visual search for objects at expected places. Here, we investigated two predictions following from this theory: If visual search is responsible for consistency effects, consistency effects could be weaker (1) with better-primed than less-primed object locations, and (2) with less-primed than better-primed scenes. In Experiments 1 and 2, locations of objects were varied within a scene to a different degree (one, two, or four possible locations). In addition, object-scene consistency was studied as a function of progressive numbers of repetitions of the backgrounds. Because repeating locations and backgrounds could facilitate visual search for objects, these repetitions might alter the object-scene consistency effect by lowering of location uncertainty. Although we find evidence for a significant consistency effect, we find no clear support for impacts of scene priming or location priming on the size of the consistency effect. Additionally, we find evidence that the consistency effect is dependent on the eccentricity of the target objects. These results point to only small influences of priming to object-scene consistency effects but all-in-all the findings can be reconciled with a visual-search explanation of the consistency effect.
Perceptual effects of scene context on object identification
Psychological Research, 1990
In a number of studies the context provided by a real-world scene has been claimed to have a mandatory, perceptual effect on the identification of individual objects in such a scene. This claim has provided a basis for challenging widely accepted data-driven models of visual perception in order to advocate alternative models with an outspoken top-down character. The present paper offers a review of the evidence to demonstrate that the observed scene-context effects may be the product of post-perceptual and task-dependent guessing strategies. A new research paradigm providing an on-line measure of genuine perceptual effects of context on object identification is proposed. First-fixation durations for objects incidentally fixated during the free exploration of real-world scenes are shown to increase when the objects are improbable in the scene or violate certain aspects of their typical spatial appearance in it. These effects of contextual violations are shown to emerge only at later stages of scene exploration, contrary to the notion of schema-driven scene perception effective from the very first scene fixation. In addition, evidence is reported in support of the existence of a facilitatory component in scene-context effects. This is taken to indicate that the context directly affects the ease of perceptual object processing and does not merely serve as a framework for checking the plausibility of the output of perceptual processes. Finally, our findings are situated against other contrasting results. Some future research questions are highlighted.
Does object view influence the scene consistency effect?
Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 2014
Traditional research on the scene consistency effect only used clearly recognizable object stimuli to show mutually interactive context effects for both the object and background components on scene perception (Davenport & Potter in Psychological Science, 15, 559-564, 2004). However, in real environments, objects are viewed from multiple viewpoints, including an accidental, hard-to-recognize one. When the observers named target objects in scenes (Experiments 1a and 1b, object recognition task), we replicated the scene consistency effect (i.e., there was higher accuracy for the objects with consistent backgrounds). However, there was a significant interaction effect between consistency and object viewpoint, which indicated that the scene consistency effect was more important for identifying objects in the accidental view condition than in the canonical view condition. Therefore, the object recognition system may rely more on the scene context when the object is difficult to recognize. In Experiment 2, the observers identified the background (background recognition task) while the scene consistency and object views were manipulated. The results showed that object viewpoint had no effect, while the scene consistency effect was observed. More specifically, the canonical and accidental views both equally provided contextual information for scene perception. These findings suggested that the mechanism for conscious recognition of objects could be dissociated from the mechanism for visual analysis of object images that were part of a scene. The "context" that the object images provided may have been derived from its view-invariant, relatively low-level visual features (e.g., color), rather than its semantic information.
Attention–memory interactions in scene perception
Spatial Vision, 2006
The perception of natural scenes relies on the integration of pre-existing knowledge with the immediate results of attentional processing, and what can be remembered from a scene depends in turn on how that scene is perceived and understood. However, there are conflicting results in the literature as to whether people are more likely to remember those objects that are consistent with the scene or those that are not. Moreover, whether any discrepancy between the likelihood of remembering schema-consistent or schema-inconsistent objects should be attributed to the schematic effects on attention or on memory remains unclear. To address this issue, the current study attempted to directly manipulate attention allocation by requiring participants to look at (i) schema-consistent objects, (ii) schema-inconsistent objects, or (iii) to share attention equally across both. Regardless of the differential allocation of attention or object fixation, schema-consistent objects were better recalled whereas recognition was independent of schema-consistency, but depended on task instruction. These results suggest that attention is important both for remembering low-level object properties, and information whose retrieval is not supported by the currently active schema. Specific knowledge of the scenes being viewed can result in the recall of non-fixated objects, but without such knowledge attention is required to encode sufficient detail for subsequent recognition. Our results demonstrate therefore that attention is not critical for the retrieval of objects that are consistent with a scene's schematic content.
A previous study (Vision Research 51 (2011) 1192-1205) found evidence for semantic guidance of visual attention during the inspection of real-world scenes, i.e., an influence of semantic relationships among scene objects on overt shifts of attention. In particular, the results revealed an observer bias toward gaze transitions between semantically similar objects. However, this effect is not necessarily indicative of semantic processing of individual objects but may be mediated by knowledge of the scene gist, which does not require object recognition, or by known spatial dependency among objects. To examine the mechanisms underlying semantic guidance, in the present study, participants were asked to view a series of displays with the scene gist excluded and spatial dependency varied. Our results show that spatial dependency among objects seems to be sufficient to induce semantic guidance. Scene gist, on the other hand, does not seem to affect how observers use semantic information to guide attention while viewing natural scenes. Extracting semantic information mainly based on spatial dependency may be an efficient strategy of the visual system that only adds little cognitive load to the viewing task.
The Effect of Consistency on Short-Term Memory for Scenes
Frontiers in Psychology, 2017
Which is more detectable, the change of a consistent or an inconsistent object in a scene? This question has been debated for decades. We noted that the change of objects in scenes might simultaneously be accompanied with gist changes. In the present study we aimed to examine how the alteration of gist, as well as the consistency of the changed objects, modulated change detection. In Experiment 1, we manipulated the semantic content by either keeping or changing the consistency of the scene. Results showed that the changes of consistent and inconsistent scenes were equally detected. More importantly, the changes were more accurately detected when scene consistency changed than when the consistency remained unchanged, regardless of the consistency of the memory scenes. A phase-scrambled version of stimuli was adopted in Experiment 2 to decouple the possible confounding effect of low-level factors. The results of Experiment 2 demonstrated that the effect found in Experiment 1 was indeed due to the change of high-level semantic consistency rather than the change of low-level physical features. Together, the study suggests that the change of consistency plays an important role in scene short-term memory, which might be attributed to the sensitivity to the change of semantic content.
Journal of Vision, 2015
Previous research has suggested that correctly placed objects facilitate eye guidance, but also that objects violating spatial associations within scenes may be prioritized for selection and subsequent inspection. We analyzed the respective eye guidance of spatial expectations and target template (precise picture or verbal label) in visual search, while taking into account any impact of object spatial inconsistency on extrafoveal or foveal processing. Moreover, we isolated search disruption due to misleading spatial expectations about the target from the influence of spatial inconsistency within the scene upon search behavior. Reliable spatial expectations and precise target template improved oculomotor efficiency across all search phases. Spatial inconsistency resulted in preferential saccadic selection when guidance by template was insufficient to ensure effective search from the outset and the misplaced object was bigger than the objects consistently placed in the same scene region. This prioritization emerged principally during early inspection of the region, but the inconsistent object also tended to be preferentially fixated overall across region viewing. These results suggest that objects are first selected covertly on the basis of their relative size and that subsequent overt selection is made considering object-context associations processed in extrafoveal vision. Once the object was fixated, inconsistency resulted in longer first fixation duration and longer total dwell time. As a whole, our findings indicate that observed impairment of oculomotor behavior when searching for an implausibly placed target is the combined product of disruption due to unreliable spatial expectations and prioritization of inconsistent objects before and during object fixation. Perspectives on inconsistency and information processing during scene viewing There is ongoing debate about how object-scene inconsistencies influence inspection behavior: in par
Processing scene context: Fast categorization and object interference
Vision Research, 2007
The extent to which object identification is influenced by the background of the scene is still controversial. On the one hand, the global context of a scene might be considered as an ultimate representation, suggesting that object processing is performed almost systematically before scene context analysis. Alternatively, the gist of a scene could be extracted sufficiently early to be able to influence object categorization. It is thus essential to assess the processing time of scene context. In the present study, we used a go/no-go rapid visual categorization task in which subjects had to respond as fast as possible when they saw a ''man-made environment'', or a ''natural environment'', that was flashed for only 26 ms. ''Man-made'' and ''natural'' scenes were categorized with very high accuracy (both around 96%) and very short reaction times (median RT both around 390 ms). Compared with previous results from our group, these data demonstrate that global context categorization is remarkably fast: (1) it is as fast as object categorization [Fabre-Thorpe, M., Delorme, A., Marlot, C., & Thorpe, S. (2001). A limit to the speed of processing in ultra-rapid visual categorization of novel natural scenes. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 13(2), 171-180]; (2) it is faster than contextual categorization at more detailed levels such as sea, mountain, indoor or urban contexts [Rousselet, G. A., Joubert, O. R., & Fabre-Thorpe, M. (2005). How long to get to the ''gist'' of real-world natural scenes? Visual Cognition, 12(6), 852-877]. Further analysis showed that the efficiency of contextual categorization was impaired by the presence of a salient object in the scene especially when the object was incongruent with the context. Processing of natural scenes might thus involve in parallel the extraction of the global gist of the scene and the concurrent object processing leading to categorization. These data also suggest early interactions between scene and object representations compatible with contextual influences on object categorization in a parallel network.