Lu Alan Z, Henderson John M
Center for Mind and Brain, University of California, Davis, 267 Cousteau Pl., Davis, CA, 95618, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of California, Davis, CA, USA.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2025 Aug 4. doi: 10.3758/s13414-025-03139-x.
Inferences on semantic scene content enable the visual system to efficiently parse complex naturalistic scenes. In the early stages of scene perception, conceptual scene gist activates semantic expectations and relevant scene-object associations that bias the viewer to affirm the presence of semantically consistent objects and to reject the presence of semantically inconsistent objects within the overall scene context. This contextual scene-object bias is crucial to various visual cognitive functions, from object recognition to attentional guidance. Despite its top-down influence, however, few studies have directly investigated the factors that drive the activation of scene-object bias. Here, we tested the role of global scene semantics in the activation of scene-object bias by comparing response bias on briefly presented upright versus inverted scenes. We found that scene inversion not only significantly delayed overall bias activation, but also differentially impacted superordinate-level versus basic-level bias. Hierarchical differences were also highlighted by earlier and more robust activation of superordinate-level bias than basic-level bias. Taken together, the present work provides important characterization to gist-activated scene-object bias, which is an essential and influential top-down mechanism in scene perception and visual cognition.
对语义场景内容的推理使视觉系统能够有效地解析复杂的自然场景。在场景感知的早期阶段，概念性场景主旨会激活语义期望和相关的场景-物体关联，这会使观察者倾向于确认语义一致的物体的存在，并在整体场景背景中拒绝语义不一致的物体的存在。这种上下文场景-物体偏差对于从物体识别到注意力引导等各种视觉认知功能至关重要。然而，尽管它具有自上而下的影响，但很少有研究直接调查驱动场景-物体偏差激活的因素。在这里，我们通过比较在短暂呈现的正立场景与倒立场景上的反应偏差，测试了全局场景语义在场景-物体偏差激活中的作用。我们发现，场景倒置不仅显著延迟了整体偏差的激活，而且对上级水平偏差和基本水平偏差产生了不同的影响。上级水平偏差比基本水平偏差更早、更强烈地激活，这也突出了层次差异。综上所述，本研究为要点激活的场景-物体偏差提供了重要的特征描述，这是场景感知和视觉认知中一种重要且有影响力的自上而下的机制。
