The Processing of Semantics and Syntax in Naturalistic Scene Viewing

当我们环顾四周时，在我们看来，世界并不是孤立物体的随机聚集。相反，自然主义场景中物体的排列符合一定的规则。这项建议的目的是进一步洞察我们如何利用关于物体与场景关系的先前经验和期望来有效地引导我们在观看自然场景时的注意力。我们希望提供一个理论框架的基础，根据该理论框架，场景中的对象-类似于句子中的词-同时以语义(即，内容相关)和句法(即，结构相关)的方式进行处理。通过有选择地违反关于场景的语义或句法组成的预期，我们将能够通过测量行为表现、眼动和事件相关电位来调查对象-场景不一致对注意分配的影响以及它们的时间动力学。更多地了解在真实世界场景中有效控制注意力的机制将有助于几个核心认知科学学科，如认知心理学、视觉神经科学或机器视觉。

When we look around, the world does not appear to us as a random aggregation of isolated objects. Rather, the arrangement of objects in naturalistic scenes conforms to certain rules. The aim of this proposal is to gain further insight into how we use prior experience and expectations regarding object-scene relationships to efficiently guide our attention when viewing naturalistic scenes. We want to provide the grounds for a theoretical framework, according to which objects in scenes — similar to words within sentences — are processed in both a semantic (i.e., content related) and a syntactic (i.e., structure related) manner. By selectively violating expectations regarding a scene's semantic or syntactic composition, we will be able to investigate the effects of object-scene inconsistencies on attention allocation as well as their temporal dynamics by measuring behavioral performance, eye movements, and event-related potentials. A greater knowledge of what mechanisms are involved in the effective control of attention in real-world scenes will contribute to several core cognitive science disciplines such as cognitive psychology, visual neuroscience, or machine vision.