Abstract
How do object-scene relationships contribute to the recognition of objects and scenes? Findings related to this question are mixed, and the mediating factors remain unclear. The current study focused on the scene consistency effect and investigated the role of recognizability in modulating this effect. In Experiment 1 and 2, we presented foreground objects and background scenes in semantic consistent or inconsistent combinations; we also manipulated the recognizability of naming targets via using degraded and undegraded pictures. Participants were required to report the names of foreground objects (Exp. 1) or background scenes (Exp. 2) after viewing pictures for 80ms. The analysis of recognition accuracy revealed contextual consistency effects on both object and scene perception, and such effects were shown to vary as a function of recognizability, with a larger influence on less recognizable objects and scenes. In addition, the mediating effects of recognizability were larger for object recognition than for scene recognition. In Experiment 3, we examined object and scene naming alone without contextual information. The comparison with the other experiments showed that both object and scene recognition were interfered with by contextual inconsistency. Taken toghether, the findings suggest that objects and scenes are processed interactively and that such interaction is mediated by recognizability. In addition, the mediating role of recognizability varies for object and scene recognition, implying the distinct processing mechanisms underlying them.
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This research was founded by “The Youth Project of the Shandong Social Science Planning Fund Program” (20DYYJ04).
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This study was approved by the ethics committee of Shandong University in China. It complies with the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later addenda. In addition, informed consent was sought and obtained from each subject prior to their participation. The original informed consent can also be obtained in supplementary materials.
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Wang, Y., Ma, W. & Yang, K. The role of recognizability in modulating scene consistency effect. Curr Psychol 43, 5555–5567 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-023-04730-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-023-04730-x