When you walk into a large room, you perceive visual information that is both close to you in depth and farther in the background. Here, we investigated how initial scene representations are affected by information across depth. We examined the role of background and foreground information on scene gist by using chimera scenes (images with a foreground and background from different scene categories). Across three experiments, we found a foreground bias: Information in the foreground initially had a strong influence on the interpretation of the scene. This bias persisted when the initial fixation position was on the scene background and when the task was changed to emphasize scene information. We concluded that the foreground bias arises from initial processing of scenes for understanding and suggests that scene information closer to the observer is initially prioritized. We discuss the implications for theories of scene and depth perception.

当您走进一个大房间时，您会感知到深度和背景中距离您更近的视觉信息。在这里，我们研究了初始场景表示如何受到跨深度信息的影响。我们通过使用嵌合场景（具有来自不同场景类别的前景和背景的图像）检查了背景和前景信息对场景要点的作用。在三个实验中，我们发现了前景偏差：前景中的信息最初对场景的解释有很大影响。当初始注视位置在场景背景上并且任务被改变以强调场景信息时，这种偏见仍然存在。我们得出结论，前景偏差源于对场景的初始处理以进行理解，并表明更接近观察者的场景信息最初被优先考虑。我们讨论了对场景和深度感知理论的影响。