School of Psychology, University of Kent, Canterbury, United Kingdom.
Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2024 Jun 12;19(6):e0304288. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0304288. eCollection 2024.
Object and scene perception are intertwined. When objects are expected to appear within a particular scene, they are detected and categorised with greater speed and accuracy. This study examined whether such context effects also moderate the perception of social objects such as faces. Female and male faces were embedded in scenes with a stereotypical female or male context. Semantic congruency of these scene contexts influenced the categorisation of faces (Experiment 1). These effects were bi-directional, such that face sex also affected scene categorisation (Experiment 2), suggesting concurrent automatic processing of both levels. In contrast, the more elementary task of face detection was not affected by semantic scene congruency (Experiment 3), even when scenes were previewed prior to face presentation (Experiment 4). This pattern of results indicates that semantic scene context can affect categorisation of faces. However, the earlier perceptual stage of detection appears to be encapsulated from the cognitive processes that give rise to this contextual interference.
物体和场景感知是交织在一起的。当人们预期某个物体出现在某个特定场景中时，他们会以更快、更准确的速度对其进行检测和分类。本研究考察了这种上下文效应是否也会影响到诸如面孔等社会物体的感知。女性和男性面孔被嵌入到具有典型女性或男性背景的场景中。这些场景背景的语义一致性影响了面孔的分类（实验 1）。这些影响是双向的，即面孔的性别也会影响场景分类（实验 2），这表明两个层面的信息是同时自动处理的。相比之下，即使在呈现面孔之前先预览场景（实验 4），更基本的面孔检测任务也不会受到语义场景一致性的影响（实验 3）。这种结果模式表明，语义场景上下文可以影响面孔的分类。然而，似乎与这种上下文干扰有关的认知过程并不会影响到检测这一更早的感知阶段。
