title: Superordinate Level Processing Has Priority Over Basic-Level Processing in Scene Gist Recognition.
abstract: By combining a perceptual discrimination task and a visuospatial working memory task, the present study examined the effects of visuospatial working memory load on the hierarchical processing of scene gist. In the perceptual discrimination task, two scene images from the same (manmade-manmade pairing or natural-natural pairing) or different superordinate level categories (manmade-natural pairing) were presented simultaneously, and participants were asked to judge whether these two images belonged to the same basic-level category (e.g., street-street pairing) or not (e.g., street-highway pairing). In the concurrent working memory task, spatial load (position-based load in Experiment 1) and object load (figure-based load in Experiment 2) were manipulated. The results were as follows: (a) spatial load and object load have stronger effects on discrimination of same basic-level scene pairing than same superordinate level scene pairing; (b) spatial load has a larger impact on the discrimination of scene pairings at early stages than at later stages; on the contrary, object information has a larger influence on at later stages than at early stages. It followed that superordinate level processing has priority over basic-level processing in scene gist recognition and spatial information contributes to the earlier and object information to the later stages in scene gist recognition.
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, Shandong Normal University, Jinan, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Qi
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Sun
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, Shandong Normal University, Jinan, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Yanju
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Ren
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Zhejiang Normal University, Jinhua, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Yang
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Zheng
authors.affiliation: School of Public Administration, Shandong Normal University, Jinan, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Mingxia
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Sun
authors.affiliation: School of Information Science and Engineering, Shandong Normal University, Jinan, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Yuanjie
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Zheng
keywords: basic level; hierarchical processing; scene gist recognition; superordinate level; visuospatial working memory load