Spontaneous associative thought may facilitate scene-gist memory via implicit scene-labeling.

Spontaneous associative processes (e.g., mind wandering, spontaneous memory recollection) are prevalent in everyday life, yet their influence on perceptual scene memory is under debate.

Scene-selective brain regions respond to embedded objects of a scene.

Objects are fundamental to scene understanding. Scenes are defined by embedded objects and how we interact with them. Paradoxically, scene processing in the brain is typically discussed in contrast to object processing.

How associative thinking influences scene perception.

Perception of our external environment is not isolated from the influence of our internal thoughts, and past evidence points to a possible common associative mechanism underlying both the perception of scenes and our internal thought. Here, we investigated the nature of the interaction between an associative mindset and scene perception, hypothesizing a functional advantage to an associative thought pattern in the perception of scenes. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that associative thinking facilitates scene perception, which evolved over the course of the experiments.

Contextual associations represented both in neural networks and human behavior.

Contextual associations facilitate object recognition in human vision. However, the role of context in artificial vision remains elusive as does the characteristics that humans use to define context. We investigated whether contextually related objects (bicycle-helmet) are represented more similarly in convolutional neural networks (CNNs) used for image understanding than unrelated objects (bicycle-fork).

Functional Context Affects Scene Processing.

Rapid visual perception is often viewed as a bottom-up process. Category-preferred neural regions are often characterized as automatic, default processing mechanisms for visual inputs of their categorical preference. To explore the sensitivity of such regions to top-down information, we examined three scene-preferring brain regions, the occipital place area (OPA), the parahippocampal place area (PPA), and the retrosplenial complex (RSC), and tested whether the processing of outdoor scenes is influenced by the functional contexts in which they are seen.