title: Scene incongruity and attention.
abstract: Does scene incongruity, (a mismatch between scene gist and a semantically incongruent object), capture attention and lead to conscious perception? We explored this question using 4 different procedures: Inattention (Experiment 1), Scene description (Experiment 2), Change detection (Experiment 3), and Iconic Memory (Experiment 4). We found no differences between scene incongruity and scene congruity in Experiments 1, 2, and 4, although in Experiment 3 change detection was faster for scenes containing an incongruent object. We offer an explanation for why the change detection results differ from the results of the other three experiments. In all four experiments, participants invariably failed to report the incongruity and routinely mis-described it by normalizing the incongruent object. None of the results supports the claim that semantic incongruity within a scene invariably captures attention and provide strong evidence of the dominant role of scene gist in determining what is perceived.
authors.affiliation: The New School for Social Research, 80 Fifth Avenue, 7th Floor, New York, NY 10011, United States. Electronic address: mackarie@newschool.edu.
authors.forename: Arien
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Mack
authors.affiliation: The New School for Social Research, 80 Fifth Avenue, 7th Floor, New York, NY 10011, United States.
authors.forename: Jason
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Clarke
authors.affiliation: The New School for Social Research, 80 Fifth Avenue, 7th Floor, New York, NY 10011, United States.
authors.forename: Muge
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Erol
authors.affiliation: The New School for Social Research, 80 Fifth Avenue, 7th Floor, New York, NY 10011, United States.
authors.forename: John
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Bert
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008570:Memory, Short-Term / Q000502:physiology; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Attention; Change detection; Iconic memory; Inattention; Scene incongruity