Rapid apprehension of the coherence of action scenes

Some information about complex naturalistic scenes, such as the scene's gist (a beach, a restaurant) or the category of an object depicted in a scene, can be extracted within a fraction of a second. The present study focused on the rapid apprehension of scene coherence in action scenes involving two actors. Coherence was manipulated by either varying global (body posture) or local (object details) action-scene properties. Scenes were presented for 20, 30, 50, or 100 ms, and subsequently masked. Viewers were able to determine scene coherence with only 30 ms presentation duration for global scene layout, but not even 100 ms sufficed for local object-action consistency. A second experiment ruled out that the difficulties in detecting local object-action consistency resulted from a strategic adaption by the participants. Overall, the results suggest that, as with scene gist, rapid extraction of coherence information from action scenes relies more on a scene's overall Gestalt than on detailed visual or even semantic representations.