Object recognition in congruent and incongruent natural scenes: A life-span study

Abstract

Efficient processing of our complex visual environment is essential and many daily visual tasks rely on accurate and fast object recognition. It is therefore important to evaluate how object recognition performance evolves during the course of adulthood. Surprisingly, this ability has not yet been investigated in the aged population, although several neuroimaging studies have reported altered activity in high-level visual ventral regions when elderly subjects process natural stimuli. In the present study, color photographs of various objects embedded in contextual scenes were used to assess object categorization performance in 97 participants aged from 20 to 91. Objects were either animals or pieces of furniture, embedded in either congruent or incongruent contexts. In every age group, subjects showed reduced categorization performance, both in terms of accuracy and speed, when objects were seen in incongruent vs. congruent contexts. In subjects over 60 years old, object categorization was greatly slowed down when compared to young and middle-aged subjects. Moreover, subjects over 75 years old evidenced a significant decrease in categorization accuracy when objects were seen in incongruent contexts. This indicates that incongruence of the scene may be particularly disturbing in late adulthood, therefore impairing object recognition. Our results suggest that daily visual processing of complex natural environments may be less efficient with age, which might impact performance in everyday visual tasks.

What you see is what you expect: rapid scene understanding benefits from prior experience

“…Although we feel that this encompassing definition is more true to the overall meaning of a scene (Zelinsky, 2013), we can draw parallels between our definition of typicality and other scene perception studies that have examined the role of either category typicality (Ehinger, Xiao, Torralba, & Oliva, 2011;Torralbo et al, 2013) or object typicality (Biederman, Mezzanotte, & Rabinowitz, 1982;Davenport & Potter, 2004;Joubert, Fize, Rousselet, & Fabre-Thorpe, 2008;Rémy et al, 2013;Võ & Henderson, 2009) on scene understanding. It has been shown that images that are more typical exemplars of a scene category are recognized better by both human observers (Torralbo et al, 2013) and computer vision classifiers (Ehinger et al, 2011), possibly because typical images have lower within-class variability (Torralbo et al, 2013).…”

The role of stimulus complexity and salience in memory for face–name associations in healthy adults: Friend or foe?

“…Regardless of age, objects and surrounding congruent scenes are processed and encoded together (Fenske, Aminoff, Gronau, & Bar, 2006; Rémy et al, 2013). Moreover, spatial contextual information perceptually primes subsequent object recognition, and face recognition is enhanced by reinstatement and impeded by deletion of encoding context (Memon & Bruce, 1983; Watkins, Ho, & Tulving, 1976; Winograd & Rivers-Bulkeley, 1977).…”

Progestogens’ effects and mechanisms for object recognition memory across the lifespan

“…Of interest is the extent to which there is cognitive decline in this period that may be associated with steroid decline, and not only aging per se , and if there is a critical window for beneficial effects of hormone-replacement [123], [124], and [125]. Aging and neurodegeneration influence many cognitive abilities, including object recognition (see [126], [127], [128], and [129]).…”