Ultrafast scene detection and recognition with limited visual information

ABSTRACTHumans can detect target colour pictures of scenes depicting concepts like picnic or harbour in sequences of six or 12 pictures presented as briefly as 13 ms, even when the target is named after the sequence. Such rapid detection suggests that feedforward processing alone enabled detection without recurrent cortical feedback. There is debate about whether coarse, global, low spatial frequencies (LSFs) provide predictive information to high cortical levels through the rapid magnocellular (M) projection of the visual path, enabling top-down prediction of possible object identities. To test the “Fast M” hypothesis, we compared detection of a named target across five stimulus conditions: unaltered colour, blurred colour, greyscale, thresholded monochrome, and LSF pictures. The pictures were presented for 13–80 ms in six-picture rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) sequences. Blurred, monochrome, and LSF pictures were detected less accurately than normal colour or greyscale pictures. When the target...