No evidence for a privileged role of global ensemble statistics in rapid scene perception: A registered replication...

The nature of visual processes underlying scene perception remains a hotly debated topic. According to one view, scene and object perception rely on similar neural mechanisms, and their processing pathways are tightly interlinked. According to another, scene gist might follow a separate pathway, relying primarily on global image properties. Recently, this latter idea has been supported with a set of experiments using content priming as a probe into scene and object perception (Brady et al. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 43, 1160-1176, 2017). The experiments have shown that preserving only structureless global ensemble texture information in the images of scenes could support rapid scene perception; however, preserving the same information in the images of objects failed to support object perception. We were intrigued by these results, since they are at odds with findings showing that scene content is primarily carried by the explicit encoding of scene structure as represented, for instance, by contours and their properties. In an attempt to reconcile these results, we attempted to replicate the experiments. In our replication experiment, we failed to find any evidence for a privileged use of texture information for scene as opposed to object primes. We conclude that there is no sufficient evidence for any fundamental differences in the processing pathways for object and scene perception: both rely on structural features that describe spatial relationships between constituent parts as well as texture information. To address this issue in the most rigorous manner possible, we here present the results of both a pilot experiment and a pre-registered replication attempt.