Visual short-term memory of local information in briefly viewed natural scenes: Configural and non-configural factors

Abstract

Typical visual environments contain a rich array of colors, textures, surfaces, and objects, but it is well established that observers do not have access to all of these visual details, even over short intervals (R. A. Rensink, J. K. O'Regan, & J. J. Clark, 1997). Rather, it seems that human vision extracts only partial information from every glance. What is the nature of this selective encoding of the scene? Although there is considerable research on short-term coding of individual objects, much less is known about the representation of a natural scene in visual short-term memory (VSTM). Here, we examine the VSTM of natural scenes using a local recognition task. A major finding is that local recognition performance is better when image segments are viewed in the context of coherent rather than scrambled scenes, suggesting that observers rely on an encoding of a global 'gist' of the scene. Variations on this experiment allow quantification of the role of multiple factors in local recognition. Color statistics and the global configural context are found to be more important than local features of the target, even for a local recognition task.

Object segmentation controls image reconstruction from natural scenes

“…This effect is plotted more compactly in Fig 2F (black symbols) in the form of rich/poor log-ratio values: for the bottom-up comparison ( x axis), log-ratios scatter around 0 (corresponding to no difference between rich and poor values), while for the top-down comparison ( y axis) they all fall above 0 (rich > poor; p < 0.01; see confidence interval indicated by black segment near y axis). It appears that the ability of the human visual system to extract local orientation signals depends greatly on whether those signals correspond to richly versus poorly represented boundaries within the top-down map, and not at all on whether the boundaries are rich or poor on the bottom-up map (see also [ 50 , 51 ]), even though visual inspection of those local boundaries demonstrates no difference for the former comparison ( Fig 2A and 2B versus Fig 2C and 2D ) and an easily perceptible difference for the latter ( Fig 2B and 2D versus Fig 2A and 2C ).…”

A category adjustment approach to memory for spatial location in natural scenes.

“…Inversion, however, interferes with the extraction of meaning from scenes (Brockmole & Henderson, 2005;Shore & Klein, 2000;Velisavljevic & Elder, 2008). For example, inverted depictions of scenes are more difficult to recognize (Rock, 1974) and produce less conceptual masking (Intraub, 1984).…”

An experimental method for the assessment of color simulation tools

“…Chromatic stimuli frequently improve visual memory performance for both normals and dichromats (Gegenfurtner, Wichmann, & Sharpe, 1998;Spence, Wong, Rusan, & Rastegar, 2006;Velisavljević & Elder, 2008). Color variations are frequently used to facilitate some visual tasks (Breslow, Trafton, & Ratwani, 2009;Yamani & McCarley, 2010).…”