Melissa L-H Võ

Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main · Institute of Psychology

In recent years, deep-learning research has produced a range of neural networks that are able to classify and generate images from a variety of stimulus domains. At the same time, advances in cross-domain analysis methods (e.g., representational similarity analysis, RSA) have allowed us to make inferences about the human visual system based on the...

Visual search is a ubiquitous challenge in natural vision, including daily tasks such as finding a friend in a crowd or searching for a car in a parking lot. Human rely heavily on relevant target features to perform goal-directed visual search. Meanwhile, context is of critical importance for locating a target object in complex scenes as it helps n...

The arrangement of objects in scenes follows certain rules (“Scene Grammar”), which we exploit to perceive and interact efficiently with our environment. We have proposed that Scene Grammar is hierarchically organized: scenes are divided into clusters of objects (“phrases”, e.g., the sink phrase); within every phrase, one object (“anchor”, e.g., th...

Viewpoint effects on object recognition interact with object-scene consistency effects. While recognition of objects seen from "accidental" viewpoints (e.g., a cup from below) is typically impeded compared to processing of objects seen from canonical viewpoints (e.g., the string-side of a guitar), this effect is reduced by meaningful scene context...

We typically encounter objects in a context, for example, a sofa in a living room or a car in the street, and this context influences how we recognize objects. Objects that are congruent with a scene context are recognised faster and more accurately than objects that are incongruent. Furthermore, objects that are incongruent with a scene elicit a s...

Like words in sentences, objects in our environment do not appear randomly, but follow a hierarchically organized structure. Objects can be part of a scene and, within a scene, are grouped into different spatial clusters, where they serve different functions. Is this organization reflected in mental representations of individual objects, and which...

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The arrangement of objects in scenes follows certain rules (“Scene Grammar”), which we exploit to perceive and interact efficiently with our environment. We have proposed that Scene Grammar is hierarchically organized: scenes are divided into clusters of objects (“phrases”, e.g., the sink phrase); within every phrase, one object (“anchor”, e.g., th...

In recent years, deep-learning research has produced a range of neural networks that are able to classify and generate images from a variety of stimulus domains. At the same time, advances in cross-domain analysis methods (e.g., representational similarity analysis, RSA) have allowed us to make inferences about the human visual system based on the...

We wish to make the following correction to the published paper “Effects of Transient Loss of Vision on Head and Eye Movements during Visual Search in a Virtual Environment” [...]

Scene-grammar describes a set of rules regarding the likely identity and position of objects within scenes. In this framework, local objects in scenes cluster around anchor objects forming phrases – meaningful subunits - where anchor objects serve as strong predictors for the spatial layout of scenes. Carrying out actions probably plays a great rol...

Visual search in natural scenes is a complex task relying on peripheral vision to detect potential targets and central vision to verify them. The segregation of the visual fields has been particularly established by on-screen experiments. We conducted a gaze-contingent experiment in virtual reality in order to test how the perceived roles of centra...

While scene context is known to facilitate object recognition, little is known about whichcontextual “ingredients” are at the heart of this phenomenon. Here, we address the question ofwhether the materials that frequently occur in scenes (e.g., tiles in bathroom) associated withspecific objects (e.g., a perfume) are relevant for processing of that...

Object and word recognition are both cognitive processes that transform visual input into meaning. Reading words, the frequency of their occurrence (“word frequency”, WF) strongly modulates recognition performance. Does the frequency of objects in our world also affect their recognition? With object-labels available in real-world image datasets, on...

Finding a bottle of milk in the bathroom would probably be quite surprising to most of us. Such a surprised reaction is driven by our strong expectations, learned through experience, that a bottle of milk belongs in the kitchen. Our environment is not randomly organized but governed by regularities that allow us to predict what objects can be found...

Central and peripheral fields of view extract information of different quality and serve different roles during visual tasks. Past research has studied this dichotomy on-screen in conditions remote from natural situations where the scene would be omnidirectional and the entire field of view could be of use. In this study, we had participants lookin...

Contextual regularities help us make sense of our visual environment. In scenes, semantically consistent objects are typically better recognized than inconsistent ones (e.g., a toaster vs. printer in a kitchen). What is the role of object and scene orientation in this so-called scene consistency effect? We presented consistent and inconsistent obje...

In our daily lives, we rely on expectations of where to find objects in a scene. Every morning without conscious reflection, we find the milk in the refrigerator. How do these schemata develop during childhood? In the current study, we investigated the behavioral responses of 72 2- to 4-year-olds in two tasks that measured scene knowledge either di...

Linear mixed-effect models are a powerful tool for modelling fixed and random effects simultaneously, but do not offer a feasible analytic solution for estimating the probability that a test correctly rejects the null hypothesis. Being able to estimate this probability, however, is critical for sample size planning, as power is closely linked to th...

We use representations and expectations formed during life-long learning to support attentional allocation and perception. In comparison to traditional laboratory investigations, real-world memory formation is usually achieved without explicit instruction and on-the-fly as a by-product of natural interactions with our environment. Understanding thi...

Despite many recent technical advances, the human efficacy of naturalistic scene processing is still unparalleled. What guides attention in real world environments? How does scene context affect object search and classification? And how are the many predictions we have with regards to our visual environment structured? Here, we review the latest fi...

The arrangement of the contents of real-world scenes follows certain spatial rules that allow for extremely efficient visual exploration. What remains underexplored is the role different types of objects hold in a scene. In the current work, we seek to unveil an important building block of scenes-anchor objects. Anchors hold specific spatial predic...

Background: In the analysis of combined ET-EEG data, there are several issues with estimating FRPs by averaging. Neural responses associated with fixations will likely overlap with one another in the EEG recording and neural responses change as a function of eye movement characteristics. Especially in tasks that do not constrain eye movements in a...

Objects that are semantically related to the visual scene context are typically better recognized than unrelated objects. While context effects on object recognition are well studied, the question which particular visual information of an object's surroundings modulates its semantic processing is still unresolved. Typically, one would expect contex...

Attributing meaning to diverse visual input is a core feature of human cognition. Violating environmental expectations (e.g., a toothbrush in the fridge) induces a late event-related negativity of the Event-Related Potential/ERP. This N400 ERP has not only been linked to the semantic processing of language, but also to objects and scenes. Inconsist...

https://doi.org/10.1167/18.10.814

Recognizing objects from different viewpoints is a necessary skill for everyday interactions with our environment. The degree of viewpoint invariance in object recognition most likely depends on the context and given task. While recognizing objects at basic level (e.g., deciding a shape is a dog) has previously been described as being viewpoint inv...

Visual long-term memory capacity appears massive and detailed when probed explicitly. In the real world, however, memories are usually built from chance encounters. Therefore, we investigated the capacity and detail of incidental memory in a novel encoding task, instructing participants to detect visually distorted objects among intact objects. In...

Predictions of environmental rules (here referred to as “scene grammar”) can come in different forms: seeing a toilet in a living room would violate semantic predictions, while finding a toilet brush next to the toothpaste would violate syntactic predictions. The existence of such predictions has usually been investigated by showing observers image...

People know surprisingly little about their own visual behavior, which can be problematic when learning or executing complex visual tasks such as search of medical images. We investigated whether providing observers with online information about their eye position during search would help them recall their own fixations immediately afterwards. Seve...

Our visual environment is not random, but follows compositional rules according to what objects are usually found where. Despite the growing interest in how such semantic and syntactic rules - a scene grammar - enable effective attentional guidance and object perception, no common image database containing highly-controlled object-scene modificatio...

People are surprisingly bad at knowing where they have looked in a scene. We tested participants' ability to recall their own eye movements in 2 experiments using natural or artificial scenes. In each experiment, participants performed a change-detection (Exp.1) or search (Exp.2) task. On 25% of trials, after 3 seconds of viewing the scene, partici...

Previous work has shown that recall of objects that are incidentally encountered as targets in visual search is better than recall of objects that have been intentionally memorized (Draschkow, Wolfe, & Võ, 2014). However, this counter-intuitive result is not seen when these tasks are performed with non-scene stimuli. The goal of the current paper i...

Viewing objects that are semantically inconsistent with the scene they are embedded in — like a toaster on the beach — elicits ERPs with a parietal negativity that peak about 400 ms after scene onset and typically reflect semantic violations. What information of the scene context is sufficient to trigger an N400 response? To answer this question, w...

Objects in real-world scenes follow a set of rules, "scene grammar", that allow us to interact with our environment with ease. However, the particulars behind this set of rules are not fully understood. We propose that scene grammar is hierarchically structured. As a testing hypothesis we will primarily differentiate between three unique levels: Sc...

In natural behavior, cognitive processes are strongly intertwined with observers' active interaction with the environment. To what degree does actively manipulating objects modulate memory representations of these objects? In a real world paradigm (fully furnished four-room apartment) we investigated if physically engaging with objects as part of a...

People have an amazing ability to identify objects and scenes within a glimpse of an eye. How automatic is this scene and object identification? Are scene and object semantics —let alone their semantic congruity— processed to a degree that modulates ongoing gaze behavior even if they are irrelevant to the current task? Objects that do not fit the s...

At VSS14, we reported an experiment where observers performed change detection with natural scenes. On 25% of trials, observers were asked to mark 12 locations where they thought they had searched in the last three seconds. Given the close relationship between fixation and attention, one might assume that they would know where they looked. However,...

Previous imaging studies, investigating the domain specificity of cortical networks, have indicated some common principles of processing across different cognitive functions and therefore shared cortical resources, e.g. the processing of hierarchical structures ("syntax") or contextual meaning ("semantics"). Whereas the majority of research focused...

People have an amazing ability to identify objects and scenes with only a glimpse. How automatic is this scene and object identification? Are scene and object semantics—let alone their semantic congruity—processed to a degree that modulates ongoing gaze behavior even if they are irrelevant to the task at hand? Objects that do not fit the semantics...

Looking for as well as actively manipulating objects that are relevant to ongoing behavioral goals are intricate parts of natural behavior. It is, however, not clear to what degree these two forms of interaction with our visual environment differ with regard to their memory representations. In a real-world paradigm, we investigated if physically en...

Usually, linguistic operations and visual-perceptual operations are studied separately in domain-specific experimental paradigms. However, there has been evidence that language and image processing interact behaviorally in a purely linguistic task (Võ & Wolfe, VSS 2014). Here we test whether brain responses during lexical decisions are modulated by...

Reading is not only ‚cold’ information processing, but involves affective and aesthetic processes that go far beyond what current models of word recognition, sentence processing, or text comprehension can explain. To investigate such ‚hot’ reading processes, standardized instruments that quantify both psycholinguistic and emotional variables at the...

Many daily activities involve looking for something. The ease with which these searches are performed often allows one to forget that searching represents complex interactions between visual attention and memory. Although a clear understanding exists of how search efficiency will be influenced by visual features of targets and their surrounding dis...

Reading is not only ‚cold’ information processing, but involves affective and aesthetic processes that go far beyond what current models of word recognition, sentence processing, or text comprehension can explain. To investigate such ‚hot’ reading processes, standardized instruments that quantify both psycholinguistic and emotional variables at the...

It seems intuitive that intentionally memorizing objects in scenes would create stronger memory representations than incidental encoding, such as might occur during visual search. Contrary to this intuition, we have shown that observers recalled more objects from photographic scenes following object search than following intentional memorization of...

Hidden formatting deleted. Delete this text! text-autospace:none">When you cant find your keys and you swear that you have "looked everywhere", you probably havent. We tracked the eyes of 24 radiologists searching through chest CT scans for small white nodules that are signs of lung cancer. They searched by scrolling up and down through the volume...

While there is no doubt that word-specific and picture-specific operations contribute to language and scene understanding, respectively, the two domains are not completely separate. For example, words can prime object recognition and vice versa. Here we ask if conceptual knowledge of the typical locations of objects in scenes ("scene syntax") affec...

MEMORIZING CRITICAL OBJECTS AND THEIR LOCATIONS IS AN ESSENTIAL PART OF EVERYDAY LIFE IN THE PRESENT STUDY, INCIDENTAL ENCODING OF OBJECTS IN NATURALISTIC SCENES DURING SEARCH WAS COMPARED TO EXPLICIT MEMORIZATION OF THOSE SCENES: TO INVESTIGATE IF PRIOR KNOWLEDGE OF SCENE STRUCTURE INFLUENCES THESE TWO TYPES OF ENCODING DIFFERENTLY, WE USED MEANIN...

Modern imaging methods like computed tomography (CT) generate 3-D volumes of image data. How do radiologists search through such images? Are certain strategies more efficient? Although there is a large literature devoted to understanding search in 2-D, relatively little is known about search in volumetric space. In recent years, with the ever-incre...

Memorizing critical objects and their locations is an essential part of everyday life. In the present study, incidental encoding of objects in scenes during search was compared to explicit memorization of those scenes. Participants were shown 10 different, indoor scenes. 150 objects (15/scene) were preselected. Regions of interest were defined arou...

Researchers have shown that people often miss the occurrence of an unexpected yet salient event if they are engaged in a different task, a phenomenon known as inattentional blindness. However, demonstrations of inattentional blindness have typically involved naive observers engaged in an unfamiliar task. What about expert searchers who have spent y...

In sentence processing, semantic and syntactic violations elicit differential brain responses observable in event-related potentials: An N400 signals semantic violations, whereas a P600 marks inconsistent syntactic structure. Does the brain register similar distinctions in scene perception? To address this question, we presented participants with s...

It seems intuitive to think that previous exposure or interaction with an environment should make it easier to search through it and, no doubt, this is true in many real-world situations. However, in a recent study, we demonstrated that previous exposure to a scene does not necessarily speed search within that scene. For instance, when observers pe...

What controls gaze allocation during dynamic face perception? We monitored participants' eye movements while they watched videos featuring close-ups of pedestrians engaged in interviews. Contrary to previous findings using static displays, we observed no general preference to fixate eyes. Instead, gaze was dynamically directed to the eyes, nose, or...

Diagnostic accuracy for radiologists is above that expected by chance when they are exposed to a chest radiograph for only one-fifth of a second, a period too brief for more than a single voluntary eye movement. How do radiologists glean information from a first glance at an image? It is thought that this expert impression of the gestalt of an imag...

PURPOSE We understand a great deal about how visual search is carried out in 2D scenes and medical images (e.g. Kundel et al., 2007). Very little is known about how search is accomplished in stacks of 2D images representing a 3D volume. How do radiologists search such stimuli? More importantly, how does that search behavior relate to errors? METHO...

Imagine searching a new kitchen for spoons. Before you find them, your eyes dwell briefly on eggs. We would assume that looking AT eggs would tend to improve subsequent search FOR eggs. However, our experiments show that this intuition is oftentimes wrong. We recorded eye movements while observers searched the same, continuously visible scene for 1...