Rapid gist perception of meaningful real-life scenes: Exploring individual and gender differences in multiple categorization tasks.

Steven Vanmarcke,Johan Wagemans

doi:10.1068/i0682

Abstract

In everyday life, we are generally able to dynamically understand and adapt to socially (ir)elevant encounters, and to make appropriate decisions about these. All of this requires an impressive ability to directly filter and obtain the most informative aspects of a complex visual scene. Such rapid gist perception can be assessed in multiple ways. In the ultrafast categorization paradigm developed by Simon Thorpe et al. (1996), participants get a clear categorization task in advance and succeed at detecting the target object of interest (animal) almost perfectly (even with 20 ms exposures). Since this pioneering work, follow-up studies consistently reported population-level reaction time differences on different categorization tasks, indicating a superordinate advantage (animal versus dog) and effects of perceptual similarity (animals versus vehicles) and object category size (natural versus animal versus dog). In this study, we replicated and extended these separate findings by using a systematic collection of different categorization tasks (varying in presentation time, task demands, and stimuli) and focusing on individual differences in terms of e.g., gender and intelligence. In addition to replicating the main findings from the literature, we find subtle, yet consistent gender differences (women faster than men).

Highlights

How quickly can we correctly determine what we see? What are the most important determinants to categorize a visual scene correctly? These and other questions motivated Thorpe, Fize, and Marlot (1996) to investigate ultrarapid object perception of complex natural images
In order to further capture the individual predictive value of these different descriptive measures (e.g., TIQ, Empathizing Questionnaire (EQ), Systemizing Questionnaire-Reversed (SQ-R), and BRIEF-A) on the population-level performance in the ultrarapid categorization tasks, we focused on calculating the appropriate bilateral correlations between these different measures [aim 3]
Before onset of the actual experiment, participants got a brief practice session with visual trial-by-trial feedback on their performance to familiarize them with the specific design

Summary

Introduction

How quickly can we correctly determine what we see? What are the most important determinants to categorize a visual scene correctly? These and other questions motivated Thorpe, Fize, and Marlot (1996) to investigate ultrarapid object perception of complex natural images. The preceding analysis of the current literature on ultrarapid categorization provides us with the necessary background to formulate the different goals for the current study These aims were threefold: (1) a general replication of the most common findings with respect to ultrarapid categorization (e.g., superordinate advantage), (2) an investigation of the presence of any important individual or group-level differences in behavioral performance (e.g., gender) on the different categorization tasks, Rapid gist perception of meaningful real-life scenes and (3) an examination of bivariate correlations between the different descriptive measures and their relation to the group-level performance on the categorization tasks

Materials and methods

Computer tasks

Behavioral baseline

Social task

BRIEF-A

Discussion