A revised framework for human scene recognition

Abstract

For humans, healthy and productive living depends on navigating through the world and behaving appropriately along the way. But in order to do this, humans must first recognize their visual surroundings. The technical difficulty of this task is hard to comprehend: the number of possible scenes that can fall on the retina approaches infinity, and yet humans often effortlessly and rapidly recognize their surroundings. Understanding how humans accomplish this task has long been a goal of psychology and neuroscience, and more recently, has proven useful in inspiring and constraining the development of new algorithms for artificial intelligence (AI). In this thesis I begin by reviewing the current state of scene recognition research, drawing upon evidence from each of these areas, and discussing an unchallenged assumption in the literature: that scene recognition emerges from independently processing information about scenes’ local visual features (i.e. the kinds of objects they contain) and global visual features (i.e., spatial parameters. ). Over the course of several projects, I challenge this assumption with a new framework for scene recognition that indicates a crucial role for information sharing between these resources. Development and validation of this framework will expand our understanding of scene recognition in humans and provide new avenues for research by expanding these concepts to other domains spanning psychology, neuroscience, and AI.