Attentional coding of categorical relations in scene perception: evidence from the flicker paradigm

The purpose of the present investigation was to determine whether the positions of objects in a scene are coded relative to one another categorically (i.e., above, below, or side of; Experiment 1) and to determine whether spatial position in scene perception is coded preattentively or only under focused attention (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, participants viewed alternating versions of a scene in which one of the objects in the scene changed its categorical relationship to the closest object in the scene, changed only its metric relationship to the closest object in a scene, or appeared and disappeared. Participants were faster at detecting changes that disrupted categorical relations than at detecting changes that disrupted only metric relations. In Experiment 2, this categorical advantage still occurred even when participants were cued to the location of the change. These results suggest that categorical spatial relations are being coded in scene perception and that attention is required in order to encode spatial relations.