Event-Related Potentials Reveal the Early Time Signatures of Visual Scene Perception

[assaf.harel]

Material below summarizes the article, The Temporal Dynamics of Scene Processing: A Multifaceted EEG Investigation, published on September 12, 2016, in eNeuro and authored by Assaf Harel, Iris I. A. Groen, Dwight J. Kravitz, Leon Y. Deouell, and Chris I. Baker.

Real-world scenes are highly complex, cluttered, and heterogeneous visual stimuli. For example, when we look at a busy street scene, we are faced with multiple types of information: different perceptual cues (such as depth and texture), information about the objects in the scene (such as to what class they belong to and their spatial arrangement), and information about the spatial layout of the scene (the global arrangement of its largescale elements).

Link back to full article

[eng_edwinalexander_phd]

Interesting study. I remember that for my Ph.D. thesis in analysis of retinal code (finished in July 2010) I read some contributions regarding this issue authored by S. Thorpe and colleagues, such as their manuscript published in Nature “Speed of processing in the human visual system”, in which he established that 150 ms is the time needed by the visual system to carry out tasks of identification of visual scenes. However, it seems then that adding complexity to scenes yields for the visual system to increase its processing time, in your case, 220 ms. Maybe for our perception there isn’t strong difference between 150 and 220 ms, but probably from the biological point of view do, having in mind the surprising speed in which the visual system processes information. I enjoyed reading this work…