Why are We Able to See Real-World Scenes So Quickly? An Investigation of the Role of Expectancy and Familiarity

1 October 1978

journal article
other
Published by SAGE Publications in Proceedings of the Human Factors Society Annual Meeting

Vol. 22 (1) , 378-382
https://doi.org/10.1177/1071181378022001102

Abstract

Subjects performed a task which allowed measurement of their speed of comprehension of real-world scenes: They attempted to detect the incongruity in the relationship between an object and its context. In 100 msec, presentations of line drawings of real-world scenes, objects could be inappropriately positioned (e.g., a fire hydrant on top of a mailbox), sized (e.g., the hydrant looking larger than a truck) or floating in air. Detection times were not significantly affected by priming the subject with a verbal label of the scene prior to its viewing (e.g., telling him he was going to see a “kitchen”) but were significantly affected by the prior presentation of the scene upwards of 30 trials earlier. The results document a remarkably efficient, content addressable, accessing mechanism for visual recognition in humans.

Keywords

This publication has 2 references indexed in Scilit:

On processing information from a glance at a scene
Published by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ,1977
Perceiving Real-World Scenes
Science, 1972