High-level Aftereffects to Global Scene Property.

Greene, M.R. & Oliva, A. (in press). Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance.

Adaptation is a ubiquitous phenomenon in the human visual system, allowing recalibration to the statistical regularities of its input. Previous work has shown that global scene properties such as openness, navigability and mean depth are informative dimensions of natural scene variation that are useful for human scene categorization. A visual system that rapidly categorizes scenes using such regularities should be continuously updated, and therefore prone to adaptation along these dimensions. Using a novel rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigm, Experiment 1 demonstrates aftereffects to several global scene properties (magnitude 8% to 21%). These aftereffects are not due to adaptation inherited from early visual areas (Experiment 2), and do not solely reflect a shift in the observers’ decision criteria regarding the global scene properties (Experiment 3). Finally, in Experiment 4, we confirm that global scene properties play a representational role for basic-level scene categories by showing that adapting to a global property (openness) influences observers’ basic-level scene categorization.