Describing scenes hardly seen.

Knowledge about scene categories, the so-called gist, can be extracted very rapidly, while recognition and naming of individual scene objects is a more effortful process. We investigate this phenomenon by presenting action scenes involving two actors for durations varying between 100 and 300 ms. Incoherence was created by mirroring individual scene actors. Upon masked presentation participants had to report content, actors and objects and to indicate whether the scene was meaningful or not. Scene coherence was judged correctly at all presentation durations. Actors were correctly identified in about one-third of the cases even with presentation durations of 100 ms, and identification rate increased up to 80% with longer durations. Identification depended on scene coherence, on the position of agents in the scene, and on the position of actors relative to the fixation cross. These interdependencies of scene and object perception indicate that the visual system seems to be very sensitive to meaningful interactions of living entities. A series of fixations is not necessary to identify actors of a scene.