Three experiments were conducted to examine the effects of scene context on rapid object recognition in natural scenes. In Experiment 1, participants performed an animal/nonanimal go/no-go categorization task in which they had to decide whether or not a flashed scene contained an animal. In Experiment 2, participants performed a two-alternative forced choice task in which they had to discriminate animals and vehicles appearing in briefly flashed scenes. In Experiment 3, participants' event-related potentials (ERPs) were measured when they performed an animal/nonanimal go/no-go categorization task. The effect of scene context was manipulated either by maintaining or excluding an object's background information. The behavioral data obtained from Experiments 1-3 showed that the recognition of an object appearing with its original scene background was more accurate and faster than the recognition of an object appearing with a meaningless background, suggesting that scene representations can be extracted rapidly and used to modulate object processing even when an image is presented briefly. Moreover, the ERP data obtained from Experiment 3 showed that the onset latency of the go/no-go ERP difference was delayed for objects appearing without scene backgrounds compared to objects appearing with scene backgrounds, providing direct evidence that scene context facilitates object recognition. Additionally, an increased frontal negativity along with a decreased late positive potential for processing objects presented in meaningless scene backgrounds suggest that the categorization task becomes more demanding when scene context is eliminated. Together, the results of the current study suggest that scene context modulates object processing even when an image is presented briefly.
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