The role of object knowledge in scene imagination
Date
2017
Authors
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
This research sought to isolate and measure the effect of objects’ properties and associations on scene imagination. Across three studies, three aspects of scene imagination were tested by presenting single object stimuli on blank backgrounds and instructing observers to imagine a scene of their choice around the object. The effects of object knowledge on each measure were assessed using normative responses of each object’s associated locations, tendency to change locations, the frequency it is encountered, its space evoking property, and its real-world size. ☐ In Chapter 1, I review previous work on the effects of object properties and associations on scene cognition. In Chapter 2, I first collected normative responses of seven types of object properties and associations for a large set of object stimuli (Experiment 1). Using this stimulus set, new participants were instructed to imagine a background of their choosing for each object and report response time to experience imagery along with an ease rating (Experiment 2). Results showed that generating scene imagery was most affected by agreement on an object’s most likely location and whether it evokes a sense of its immediate surrounding space. ☐ In Chapter 3, I tested whether an object’s space evoking property (Mullally & Maguire, 2011) influenced descriptions of imagined scenes. Participants each viewed the same set of object stimuli for 40 seconds and described an imagined scene (Experiment 3). Within each participant, objects previously rated as “space defining” led to greater use of spatial terms and more entities per description than those rated as “space ambiguous.” Thus, objects which evoke a strong sense of their immediate space led to more spatially coherent, and populous, descriptions of scene imagery. ☐ In Chapter 4, I used a boundary extension paradigm to test whether memory for the expanse of an imagined scene would be affected by an object’s space evoking property. On each trial, objects previously rated as “space defining” and “space ambiguous” were presented on a blank picture space for 15 seconds. During this time, three conditions determined whether participants were simply instructed to remember the objects (memory-only), or were given additional instructions to fill the picture space with either an imagined a scene based an audio description (guided-imagery) or a scene of their choosing (self-imagery). After all objects were presented, memory was tested using a five-point boundary rating scale ranging from “much smaller/much farther away” to “much bigger/much closer-up.” Effects of imagination conditions were inconsistent, but space defining objects were remembered as larger in all cases, an effect which I argue is due to their large real-world size. ☐ In Chapter 5, I summarize the above results to argue that objects guide scene imagination by facilitating location selection and spatial layout.
Description
Keywords
Psychology, Boundary extension, Imagination, Object knowledge, Scene representation, Space defining, Spatial language