Abstract
Scene perception is aided by knowledge about which objects and settings tend to co-occur. Semantically consistent objects and background scenes are reported more accurately whether the task is to report the object, the background, or both the object and background, suggesting that objects and their settings are processed interactively, not in isolation(Davenport & Potter, in press). New experiments further investigated consistency effects by looking at the effect of an additional foreground object. When there are two objects in a setting, how does one object influence the report of the other object, and how do they influence background perception? Stimuli consisted of 36 color photographs with objects pasted in using Adobe Photoshop. Number of objects (one vs. two foreground objects) and consistency, (objects belonging or not belonging in the scene) were manipulated. Participants saw each picture for 80 ms followed by a mask and typed their response into a dialog box. In the first experiment, subjects reported the foreground objects, in the second experiment, subjects reported the background settings. We report the influence of object to object consistency on picture perception and consider the implications for an interactive account of scene processing.