Rapid apprehension of the coherence of action scenes

Abstract

Some information about complex naturalistic scenes, such as the scene's gist (a beach, a restaurant) or the category of an object depicted in a scene, can be extracted within a fraction of a second. The present study focused on the rapid apprehension of scene coherence in action scenes involving two actors. Coherence was manipulated by either varying global (body posture) or local (object details) actionscene properties. Scenes were presented for 20, 30, 50, or 100 ms, and subsequently masked. Viewers were able to determine scene coherence with only 30 ms presentation duration for global scene layout, but not even 100 ms sufficed for local object-action consistency. A second experiment ruled out that the difficulties in detecting local object-action consistency resulted from a strategic adaption by the participants. Overall, the results suggest that, as with scene gist, rapid extraction of coherence information from action scenes relies more on a scene's overall Gestalt than on detailed visual or even semantic representations.

Making Sense of Real-World Scenes

“…First, interpreting the rapidly extracted gist depends on stored representations of typically occurring patterns [21], developed over experiences (e.g., a couch is commonly found in a living room). When scenes are less typical, such as when they contain inconsistent objects [e.g., a boulder in a living room, 3], or contain atypical action relationships between individuals [22], the scene requires longer to process. Scene processing is therefore not entirely stimulus-driven, but is dependent on matching a percept to prior experiences.…”

Seeing for speaking: Semantic and lexical information provided by briefly presented, naturalistic action scenes

“…They are able to extract information from complex visual scenes very rapidly, even when these are only briefly seen–as in zapping through TV channels. The overall meaningfulness or coherence of scenes, as well as their gist, involving a coarse understanding and categorization of the scene as a whole (a park, a track course), can be apprehended within a glance [ 1 , 2 , 3 ]. Moreover, decisions as to whether or not a scene includes a building, a vehicle, an animal, can be made with high accuracy even with very briefly flashed scenes [ 4 , 5 ].…”

“…One driving question concerns the nature and detail of the representations that underlie this amazing performance. Whereas scene coherence might well be signalled by global visual information [ 1 ], extracting the scene’s gist and detection of particular scene elements seem to require semantic information. There is ample evidence that this can be done within a first glance, but researchers disagree on what exactly can be extracted during early visual processing.…”

Making Sense of Other People’s Encounters: Towards an Integrative Model of Relational Impression Formation

“…Equally unclear is the effect of exposure duration on the impression formation process. So far, initial research suggests that perceivers can accurately detect up to three conspecifics in natural photographs within 50 ms (Railo et al 2016), but require slightly more time (about 100 ms) to decide whether two people are facing each other (Dobel et al 2007;Glanemann et al 2016) and/or whether one person is acting upon another (Hafri et al 2013). Even more time (approx.…”