Using Knowledge: Top-Down Processing • 65meaning is often related to what happens within a scene. For example, food prepara-
tion, cooking, and perhaps eating occur in a kitchen; waiting around, buying tickets,
checking luggage, and going through security checkpoints happen in airports. Semantic
regularities are the characteristics associated with the functions carried out in different
types of scenes.
One way to demonstrate that people are aware of semantic regularities is simply to
ask them to imagine a particular type of scene or object, as in the following demonstration.DEMONSTRATION Visualizing Scenes and Objects
Your task in this demonstration is simple. Close your eyes and then visualize or simply think
about the following scenes and objects:- An office
- The clothing section of a department store
- A microscope
- A lion
Most people who have grown up in modern society have little trouble visualizing
an offi ce or the clothing section of a department store. What is important about this
ability, for our purposes, is that part of this visualization involves details within these
scenes. Most people see an offi ce as having a desk with a computer on it, bookshelves,
and a chair. The department store scene contains racks of clothes, a changing room, and
perhaps a cash register.
What did you see when you visualized the microscope or the lion? Many people
report seeing not just a single object, but an object within a setting. Perhaps you per-
ceived the microscope sitting on a lab bench or in a labora-
tory and the lion in a forest, on a savannah, or in a zoo.
Knowledge of semantic regularities were probably at work
when Crystal used her knowledge of the things that are
usually found on beaches when she fi rst perceived “drift-
wood” and then “beach umbrella.”
An example of the knowledge we have of things that
typically belong in certain scenes is provided by an experi-
ment in which Andrew Hollingworth (2005) had observers
study for 20 seconds a scene, such as the picture of the gym
in ● Figure 3.27, that contained a target object, such as the
barbell on the mat, or the same scene but without the target
object. Observers then saw a picture of the target object
alone in the center of the screen followed by a blank screen,
and were asked to move a cursor on the blank screen to the
place where the target object was in the scene they had just
seen (if they had seen the picture of the scene containing the
target object) or where they would expect to see the target
object in the scene (if they had seen the picture of the scene
but without the target object).
The results, which included the averaged data for many
different objects and scenes, indicated that observers who
saw the target objects located their positions accurately in
the scene (small circle), but observers who had not seen the
target objects were still able to predict where they would
be (larger circle). What this means for the gym scene is that
observers were apparently able to predict where the bar-
bell would appear based on their prior experience in seeing
objects in gyms.● FIGURE 3.27 Hollingworth’s (2005) observers saw scenes
like this one (without the circles). In this scene, the target object
is the barbell, although observers do not know this when they
are viewing the scene. “Non-target” scenes are the same but do
not include the target. The circles indicate the average error of
observers’ judgments of the position of the target object for trials
in which they had seen the object in the scene (small circle) and
trials in which the object had not appeared in the scene (larger
circle). (Source: A. Hollingworth, “Memory for Object Position in Natural Scenes,”
Visual Cognition, 12, 1003–1016, 2005. Reprinted by permission of the publisher,
Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals.))
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