Natural Scene Recognition with Increasing Time-On-Task: The Role of Typicality and Global Image Properties

Abstract

Human observers can recognize natural images very effectively. Yet, in the literature there is a debate about the extent to which the recognition of natural images requires controlled attentional processing. In the present study we address this topic by testing whether natural scene recognition is affected by mental fatigue. Mental fatigue is known to particularly compromise high-level, controlled attentional processing of local features. Effortless, automatic processing of more global features of an image stays relatively intact, however. We conducted a natural image categorization experiment (N = 20) in which mental fatigue was induced by time-on-task (ToT). Stimuli were images from 5 natural scene categories. Semantic typicality (high or low) and the magnitude of 7 global image properties were determined for each image in separate rating experiments. Significant performance effects of typicality and global properties on scene recognition were found, but, despite a general decline in performance, these effects remained unchanged with increasing ToT. The findings support the importance of the global property processing in natural scene recognition and suggest that this process is insensitive to mental fatigue.

Cross-Modal Conflict Increases With Time-on-Task in a Temporal Discrimination Task

“…By applying these values, the recommended minimum sample size for these effects and interactions was less than 10 to achieve a power level of 90% and alpha <0.05. In addition, to attain the sufficient power of the effect of Time-on-Task (ToT) on performance measures and HRV, we considered recent ToT studies addressing mental workload (e.g., Hopstaken et al, 2015a; Hidalgo-Muñoz et al, 2018; Reteig et al, 2019) as well as our earlier studies conducted with protocols similar to the current study (Csathó et al, 2012, 2013, 2015). Calculating with the effect sizes reported in these papers, about 19 participants were recommended as a minimum sample size to detect ToT-related effects (power = 90% and alpha <0.05).…”

Does Threat Have an Advantage After All? – Proposing a Novel Experimental Design to Investigate the Advantages of Threat-Relevant Cues in Visual Processing

“…The two eccentricities used in the present study could also be seen as task difficulty (Csathó et al, 2008) with the inner circle being the easy and the outer circle being the harder one. Previous results (Li et al, 2002; Csathó et al, 2015) showed that the processing of evolutionary relevant natural scenes (similar to what we used as backgrounds) require minimal attentional capacity. Thus, we suggest that the interaction is due to the difference in the effort needed to process the background image, such that automatic processing made it possible to find the targets equally as fast in two eccentricities.…”

Coherent natural scene structure facilitates the extraction of task-relevant object information in visual cortex

“…The enhanced extraction of object information from the intact scenes suggests that useful information about scene gist is extracted less efficiently from the jumbled scenes. Indeed, the rapid analysis of scene gist depends on our priors about typical scene composition ( Csathó et al., 2015 ; Greene et al., 2015 ). Neuroimaging studies suggest that the cortical scene processing network is tuned to these priors ( Kaiser et al., 2020a ; Torralbo et al., 2013 ), and that the early extraction of properties like the scene's basic-level category depends on the structural coherence of the scene ( Kaiser et al., 2020b ).…”