Rapid natural scene categorization in the near absence of attention

2002/06/20 by Fei Fei Li, Rufin VanRullen, Christof Koch +1 · 7 citations
Neuroscience · Psychology · #Artificial intelligence #Biology #Categorization #Cognition #Cognitive psychology #Computer science #Face Recognition and Perception #Natural (archaeology) #Neural dynamics and brain function #Neuroscience #Perception #Psychology #Selective attention #Task (project management) #Visual attention #Visual perception #Visual perception and processing mechanisms

paper · doi:10.1073/pnas.092277599

openalex publication_date 2002/06/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

What can we see when we do not pay attention? It is well known that we can be "blind" even to major aspects of natural scenes when we attend elsewhere. The only tasks that do not need attention appear to be carried out in the early stages of the visual system. Contrary to this common belief, we report that subjects can rapidly detect animals or vehicles in briefly presented novel natural scenes while simultaneously performing another attentionally demanding task. By comparison, they are unable to discriminate large T's from L's, or bisected two-color disks from their mirror images under the same conditions. We conclude that some visual tasks associated with "high-level" cortical areas may proceed in the near absence of attention.

Citations

• Categorical Representation of Visual Stimuli in the Primate Prefrontal Cortex
• Attention and the detection of signals.
• A feature-integration theory of attention

Cited by

• Role of task-directed attention in nonconscious and conscious response priming by form and color.
• Neural mechanisms of rapid natural scene categorization in human visual cortex
• A Stochastic‐Variational Model for Soft Mumford‐Shah Segmentation
• Anne Marie Treisman. 27 February 1935—9 February 2018
• Looking Beyond a Clever Narrative
• Fei-Fei Li [wikipedia]
• One-shot learning (computer vision) [wikipedia]