Spatial Congruency Bias in Contexts: The Influence of Background Scenes on Object-location binding
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Date
2022-03
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Abstract
When people are looking for something, they sometimes become confused since some objects appear to be rather similar, misleading them to believe the objects are the same even when they are different. This scenario illustrates a common misjudgment of visual perception due to various reasons. One of the behavioral phenomena that explains why people misjudge objects in visual environments is the spatial congruency bias. The spatial congruency bias reveals that people are more inclined to misjudge two objects presented sequentially as having the same identity when they are in the same spatial location, implying that irrelevant location information may be bound to object identity (Golomb et al., 2014). Previous research has only explored spatial congruency bias between isolated objects, whereas in realistic settings, objects almost always co-occur with background scenes. Thus, we aimed to explore the influence of background scenes on the spatial congruency bias and object-location binding. In a series of experiments, subjects performed a same-different judgment task on the identity of two objects presented successively in either the same or different spatial locations. The first experiment tested whether the effect of background scenes on the spatial congruency bias depends on the consistency between the identity of background scenes, by presenting two objects with either the same or different background scenes (same-scene vs. different-scene condition). We found a significant spatial congruency bias only when two objects were presented with the same background scene, but not when presented with different scenes, though the difference across scene conditions was not significant. Then, the second experiment tested whether the mere presence of a background scene affects the spatial congruency bias. Here, the two objects were superimposed on a background scene or blank white background (scene-present vs. scene-absent condition). We found a robust spatial congruency bias when objects were presented without a background, but not when presented with a background scene. We conclude that the mere presence of background scenes weakly modulates object-location binding (Experiment 2), but that consistency of scene identity facilitates object-location binding (Experiment 1). These findings pave the way for future studies (e.g., Experiment 3, in prep) into the effect of visual stability of scenes on spatial congruency bias and object-location binding.
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Human Experience (The Ohio State University Denman Undergraduate Research Forum)
Keywords
visual perception, spatial congruency bias, object recognition, object-location binding, contextual information, scene perception