Kaiser, Daniel orcid.org/0000-0002-9007-3160, Inciuraite, Gabriele and Cichy, Radoslaw M (2020) Rapid contextualization of fragmented scene information in the human visual system. Neuroimage. 117045. ISSN 1053-8119
Abstract
Real-world environments are extremely rich in visual information. At any given moment in time, only a fraction of this information is available to the eyes and the brain, rendering naturalistic vision a collection of incomplete snapshots. Previous research suggests that in order to successfully contextualize this fragmented information, the visual system sorts inputs according to spatial schemata, that is knowledge about the typical composition of the visual world. Here, we used a large set of 840 different natural scene fragments to investigate whether this sorting mechanism can operate across the diverse visual environments encountered during real-world vision. We recorded brain activity using electroencephalography (EEG) while participants viewed incomplete scene fragments at fixation. Using representational similarity analysis on the EEG data, we tracked the fragments' cortical representations across time. We found that the fragments' typical vertical location within the environment (top or bottom) predicted their cortical representations, indexing a sorting of information according to spatial schemata. The fragments' cortical representations were most strongly organized by their vertical location at around 200ms after image onset, suggesting rapid perceptual sorting of information according to spatial schemata. In control analyses, we show that this sorting is flexible with respect to visual features: it is neither explained by commonalities between visually similar indoor and outdoor scenes, nor by the feature organization emerging from a deep neural network trained on scene categorization. Demonstrating such a flexible sorting across a wide range of visually diverse scenes suggests a contextualization mechanism suitable for complex and variable real-world environments.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | Copyright © 2020. Published by Elsevier Inc. |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of York |
Academic Units: | The University of York > Faculty of Sciences (York) > Psychology (York) |
Depositing User: | Pure (York) |
Date Deposited: | 23 Jun 2020 08:30 |
Last Modified: | 16 Oct 2024 16:41 |
Published Version: | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.117045 |
Status: | Published |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.117045 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:162198 |
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