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When we look at a chair or a giraffe we cannot suppress a semantic interpretation of that image, although we need not name it (e.g., Smith & McGee, 1980). Given that classification of object images is mandatory, is it capacity free? Subjects attempted to detect the presence or absence of a target object, specified by basic-level name, in a 100-ms display of a nonscene (clock face) arrangement of one to six pictures of common objects. There was a sharp monotonic decrease in detectability as a function of the number of objects in the display, indicating that object detection under these conditions is an attention-demanding process. No benefit was observed for targets that were likely to co-occur with the distractors. This latter result is evidence against an account of the perceptual interference found for improbable objects in real-world scenes, which holds that the interference derives from an inventory listing of the objects without regard to their spatial relations.

In our everyday world, we typically have an expectancy as to the kinds of scenes that we will see from one glance to the next. Also, many of the scenes that we do see are familiar in the sense that they have been experienced before. Do these factors influence the perception of a scene? In three experiments, priming subjects with a verbal descriptor of a scene was not found to improve reliably the perception of that scene as assessed by the speed and accuracy of detecting an incongruity between an object and its setting (Experiments 1 and 2) or a specified target object (Experiment 3). Also, in attempting to perceive these scenes, subjects could not capitalize on the residue from prior exposures of a scene's background, even though those backgrounds had been processed to the point where semantic information had been extracted from them. Although these results are inconsistent with recent speculations on the role of frames in scene perception, recent experiments on the perception of a scene from a single fixation, and film-editing practice with "flash cuts." The implications of these results are that the mechanisms for perceiving and interpreting nondegraded real-world scenes are so quick and efficient that conditions can readily be found in which priming and prior exposures of substantial portions of scenes are not helpful for perceiving and judging certain aspects of those scenes.

Studies of crowding in various settings have shown that individuals are aroused and frequently suffer from ill health. Several studies have shown that it is possible to successfully intervene in residential, shopping, and classroom settings to reduce the negative effects of crowding. The present laboratory experiment assessed the effectiveness of two tactics commonly used by passengers in crowded mass transit settings. Results indicated that the two tactics, reading a newspaper or talking to others, failed to reduce arousal. An explanation for the failure of these tactics is offered.

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