The Global Color of a Scene is Relevant for Human Visual Scene Discrimination Open Access
Chen, Zirui (Spring 2022)
Abstract
Humans are incredibly good at discriminating places, or “scenes”, (e.g., to recognize an image as a beach and not a kitchen). But are th precise stimulus features that humans use to discriminate one scene from another. In this study, I hypothesized that the global color of a scene is a stimulus feature that humans use for differentiating visual scenes, but not objects, and predicted that 1) behaviorally, participants will show a more different dissimilarity judgement pattern for color versus grayscale scenes than for color versus grayscale objects (Experiment 1), and 2) neurally, color versus grayscale scenes will be represented more differently than color versus grayscale objects. To test my hypothesis, I asked the participants to behaviorally judge the dissimilarity among a set of scene and object images that are highly variable in global color (e.g., a forest full of red versus green leaves) and the grayscale version of the exact same images (Experiment 1). Consistent with my hypothesis, I found a greater difference between the participants’ behavioral dissimilarity judgment for color versus grayscale scenes than color versus grayscale objects. Next, I showed participants the same set of images in the functional magnetic resonance imagining (fMRI) scanner and examined the neural response of the cortical scene and object processing system (Experiment 2). Consistent with my hypothesis, I found that human brains were more sensitive to the differences between color versus grayscale scenes than color versus grayscale objects, providing neural evidence that global color is used for human visual scene processing. Collectively, these findings suggested that global color is a stimulus feature used for human visual scene discrimination.
Table of Contents
Introduction...................................................................................................................................1
Experiment 1 (Behavioral)...............................................................................................................4
Methods...............................................................................................................................4
Results.................................................................................................................................7
Experiment 2 (fMRI).......................................................................................................................9
Methods...............................................................................................................................9
Results................................................................................................................................12
Discussion....................................................................................................................................15
Conclusion....................................................................................................................................19
Supplement Analysis.....................................................................................................................20
Supplement Table..........................................................................................................................23
References.....................................................................................................................................24
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