A novel task contrasting visual object and scene perception in young adults

Abstract

Young adults outperform older adults on memory tasks that require spatial, but not object, processing. Some research suggests that these spatial deficits extend to other types of cognitive processing, not just memory, and that deficits associated with all of these are caused by degradation of spatial relational representations. To address this in future studies, I designed a task that encompassed both object and spatial perception using the same task and same stimuli, going beyond previous paradigms which employed different tasks and stimuli. In a pilot study, nine young adult participants (age = 19.89, edu = 14.44) viewed a scene and a floor plan simultaneously, side-by-side, and judged whether object identity or location matched between the two. Across trials, the scene either matched the floor plan, the identity of an object differed from the floor plan, or the location of an object differed from the floor plan. Scenes were presented from a centre or off-centre viewpoint. Results revealed that accuracy rates were neither too high nor too low to make meaningful comparisons in task performance. While there were trade-offs between speed and accuracy, combining both measures showed that performance was well-matched across conditions. Viewpoint manipulation affected performance, with participants making more errors on location mismatch scenes presented from an off-centre viewpoint. These results suggest that the floor plan task is well-suited for comparing the differing processes involved in object and scene perception. Future studies will be able to compare performance between object and spatial conditions as well as between age groups.