Typical visual-field locations facilitate access to awareness for everyday objects

Abstract

In real-world vision, humans are constantly confronted with complex environments that contain a multitude of objects. These environments are spatially structured, so that objects have different likelihoods of appearing in specific parts of the visual space. Our massive experience with such positional regularities prompts the hypothesis that the processing of individual objects varies in efficiency across the visual field: when objects are encountered in their typical locations (e.g., we are used to seeing lamps in the upper visual field and carpets in the lower visual field), they should be more efficiently perceived than when they are encountered in atypical locations (e.g., a lamp in the lower visual field and a carpet in the upper visual field). Here, we provide evidence for this hypothesis by showing that typical positioning facilitates an object's access to awareness. In two continuous flash suppression experiments, objects more efficiently overcame inter-ocular suppression when they were presented in visual-field locations that matched their typical locations in the environment, as compared to non-typical locations. This finding suggests that through extensive experience the visual system has adapted to the statistics of the environment. This adaptation may be particularly useful for rapid object individuation in natural scenes.

Contextual and Spatial Associations Between Objects Interactively Modulate Visual Processing

“…Confirming the weak absolute positional associations of our stimuli, a previous study using the same stimulus set provided evidence for enhanced detectability of the objects presented in their typical relative positions, but found no effect of typical absolute position ( Stein et al. 2015 ), even though the same detection paradigm was sensitive to such effects for objects that are more strongly associated with particular locations (e.g., airplane, shoe) and presented at larger eccentricities ( Kaiser and Cichy 2018b ). For these reasons, we think the contribution of typical absolute position is likely to be small in our study, with the objects’ relative positioning being the driving factor underlying our results.…”

“…Up until now, we have only considered object position within a relative framework (i.e., lamp above table). However, there is increasing evidence that presenting an object in its typical absolute location (e.g., lamp in the upper visual field) can also facilitate its visual processing ( Quek and Finkbeiner 2014 ; Kaiser and Cichy 2018a , 2018b ; Kaiser et al. 2019 ).…”

On the Necessity of Recurrent Processing during Object Recognition: It Depends on the Need for Scene Segmentation

“…SC correlates with perception of naturalness of a scene (Groen et al, 2013)), and could be used as diagnostic information for the detection of an animal. Additionally, previous research has shown that natural scenes and scene structure can facilitate object recognition (Davenport and Potter, 2004;Neider and Zelinsky, 2006;Kaiser and Cichy, 2018). Results from the current study, using artificial backgrounds of varying complexity, replicate earlier findings while allowing us to attribute the effects to SC and CE, and the subsequent effect on segmentability.…”

Object representations in the human brain reflect the co-occurrence statistics of vision and language

“…One open question is whether the visual cortex contains representations that reflect the natural statistics of object locations in images. Here we examined object co-occurrence independent of object location, but it is known that the visual system also takes advantage of associations between objects and spatial locations 61 and that perceptual behaviors and cortical representations are sensitive to violations of the typical positions of objects 2,[62][63][64] . Future investigations could utilize annotated image databases to explicitly quantify these spatial statistics and to examine how they relate to the object representations of visual cortex.…”