Superordinate Level Processing Has Priority Over Basic-Level Processing in Scene Gist Recognition

A perceptual paradigm and psychophysical evidence for hierarchy in scene gist processing.

What is the order of processing in scene gist recognition? Following the seminal studies by Rosch (1978) and Tversky and Hemmenway (1983) it has been assumed that basic-level categorization is privileged over the superordinate level because the former maximizes both within-category similarity and between-category variance. However, recent research has begun to challenge this view (Oliva & Torra...

The spatiotemporal dynamics of scene gist recognition.

Viewers can rapidly extract a holistic semantic representation of a real-world scene within a single eye fixation, an ability called recognizing the gist of a scene, and operationally defined here as recognizing an image's basic-level scene category. However, it is unknown how scene gist recognition unfolds over both time and space-within a fixation and across the visual field. Thus, in 3 exper...

Beyond Gist

Research on scene categorization generally concentrates on gist processing, particularly the speed and minimal features with which the "story" of a scene can be extracted. However, this focus has led to a paucity of research into how scenes are categorized at specific hierarchical levels (e.g., a scene could be a road or more specifically a highway); consequently, research has disregarded a pot...

The natural/man-made distinction is made before basic-level distinctions in scene gist processing

Spatio - Temporal Scene Gist Dynamics

Viewers can rapidly extract a holistic semantic representation of a real-world scene within a single eye fixation, an ability called recognizing the gist of a scene, and operationally defined here as recognizing an image’s basic-level scene category. However, it is unknown how scene gist recognition unfolds over both time and space — within a fixation and across the visual field. Thus, in three...