A dual process account: The effect of context congruency on identification and detection processes in a change detection task

Abstract

The goal of this study was to investigate the underlying processes involved in complex scene perception and, more specifically, the influence of context congruency on change detection performance. In two separate experiments, participants were asked to detect changing objects embedded in contextually congruent and incongruent scenes. In the first experiment, participants were faster and made fewer errors detecting incongruent objects than congruent objects. In the second experiment, participants were given valid and invalid cues for the target objects. In this case, participants were faster and made fewer errors detecting incongruent objects when the cue did not accurately describe the target object. This incongruency benefit, however, was eliminated when the cue accurately described the target object. These findings support a dual process account of complex scene perception, wherein task constraints can lead to incongruency benefits in some cases, but not others.