The Briefest of Glances: The Time Course of Natural Scene Understanding

• Main Authors: Greene, Michelle R. (Contributor), Oliva, Aude (Contributor)
• Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Psychological Science, 2012-05-04T16:06:11Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

 What information is available from a brief glance at a novel scene? Although previous efforts to answer this question have focused on scene categorization or object detection, real-world scenes contain a wealth of information whose perceptual availability has yet to be explored. We compared image exposure thresholds in several tasks involving basic-level categorization or global-property classification. All thresholds were remarkably short: Observers achieved 75%-correct performance with presentations ranging from 19 to 67 ms, reaching maximum performance at about 100 ms. Global-property categorization was performed with significantly less presentation time than basic-level categorization, which suggests that there exists a time during early visual processing when a scene may be classified as, for example, a large space or navigable, but not yet as a mountain or lake. Comparing the relative availability of visual information reveals bottlenecks in the accumulation of meaning. Understanding these bottlenecks provides critical insight into the computations underlying rapid visual understanding.