Scene perception: Detecting and judging objects undergoing relational violations

Abstract

Five classes of relations between an object and its setting can characterize the organization of objects into real-world scenes. The relations are (1) Interposition (objects interrupt their background), (2) Support (objects tend to rest on surfaces), (3) Probability (objects tend to be found in some scenes but not others), (4) Position (given an object is probable in a scene, it often is found in some positions and not others), and (5) familiar Size (objects have a limited set of size relations with other objects). In two experiments subjects viewed brief (150 msec) presentations of slides of scenes in which an object in a cued location in the scene was either in a normal relation to its background or violated from one to three of the relations. Such objects appear to (1) have the background pass through them, (2) float in air, (3) be unlikely in that particular scene, (4) be in an inappropriate position, and (5) be too large or too small relative to the other objects in the scene. In Experiment I, subjects attempted to determine whether the cued object corresponded to a target object which had been specified in advance by name. With the exception of the Interposition violation, violation costs were incurred in that the detection of objects undergoing violations was less accurate and slower than when those same objects were in normal relations to their setting. However, the detection of objects in normal relations to their setting (innocent bystanders) was unaffected by the presence of another object undergoing a violation in that same setting. This indicates that the violation costs were incurred not because of an unsuccessful elicitation of a frame or schema for the scene but because properly formed frames interfered with (or did not facilitate) the perceptibility of objects undergoing violations. As the number of violations increased, target detectability generally decreased. Thus, the relations were accessed from the results of a single fixation and were available sufficiently early during the time course of scene perception to affect the perception of the objects in the scene. Contrary to expectations from a bottom-up account of scene perception, violations of the pervasive physical relations of Support and Interposition were not more disruptive

Speed limits: Orientation and semantic context interactions constrain natural scene discrimination dynamics.

“…Graf et al suggested that the first object in the sequence adjusts the orientation of an abstract reference frame in which the second object is initially processed. However, the preceding context may also provide semantic and structural information that could facilitate the recognition of the object (Bar, 2004;Biederman et al, 1982) in addition to orientation priming. Bar (2004) recently proposed a physiologically motivated model of object recognition in which he suggested that the scene context may facilitate the initial processing of the objectfor example, by limiting the search space during object recognition.…”

“…Hollingworth and Henderson (1998), however, attributed the results of Biederman et al (1982) to response bias. These authors did not find a congruency advantage when they controlled for bias and concluded that object identification is isolated from semantic information about the scene context.…”

“…Besides features like position and relative size, semantics of the context may play an important role in object discrimination (Biederman et al, 1982;Boyce, Pollatsek, & Rayner, 1989). However, the nature and the level of this object-context interaction is a matter of dispute.…”

Diagnostic Colors Mediate Scene Recognition

“…When scenes are used, it is to assess the role of perceptual context in object recognition (e.g., Aginski & Tarr, 2000;Biederman et al, 1982;Boyce, Pollatsek, & Rayner, 1989;Delorme, Fabre-Thorpe, Richard, Fize, & Thorpe, 1998;Hollingworth & Henderson, 1998;Intraub, 1997;Sanocki, Bowyer, Heath, & Sarkar, 1998). For example, Delorme et al (1998) presented humans and monkeys 400 pictures of food and animals in their natural background scene contexts.…”

“…However, this depiction does not account for all situations of recognition. Scenes are often recognized very quickly, in a single glance-in fact, as fast as a single component object (Biederman, Mezzanotte, & Rabinowitz, 1982;Friedman, 1979;Intraub, 1997;Potter, 1976). Under these conditions, it has been shown that visual information could mediate scene recognition without the prior and necessary recognition of component objects (Schyns & Oliva, 1994).…”