Distance perception in natural scene images generalize across individuals, tasks, and viewing time

Natural scenes contain a multitude of cues that can support spatial perception, making it difficult to study. Here, in a series of preregistered behavioral studies, we quantify scene-specific spatial representations that generalize over tasks, stimulus durations, and participants. We presented 156 scene images at varying durations (125, 250, 1,000 ms) to independent groups of participants who either estimated or discriminated the egocentric distance to target objects. Not only were participants able to estimate distance in images seen once, they also showed scene-specific deviations that strongly predicted behavior in the other task being performed by different observers. Given the only commonality was the scenes, pictorial features must be driving the observed responses. In fact, we found one such feature, the size of the ground plane, explained the magnitude of the observed scene-specific deviations. Our results implicate a finely tuned, rapid mechanism for integrating pictorial information into percepts of distance in natural images. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).