Come here often? How familiarity affects scene processing

Throughout our day, we understand the surrounding visual environment in a process that occurs quickly and automatically. However, if someone frequently encounters an environment, do they process it differently from an environment they rarely experience? In the current study, we examined whether familiarity with a context would affect one’s scene perception. Scene perception was queried using a paradigm where on each trial two scenes were presented briefly, one after the other, and the task was to judge whether the scenes were the same or different. The two scenes were either exactly the same, two different exemplars of the same context, or two completely different scenes. Across two experiments, we examined how familiarity with the context affected performance. In experiment 1 (N = 145) we examined in separate models how one’s experience with nature, streets, long-distance travel (e.g., airplanes), and COVID-19 pandemic closures (i.e., mandated lock-downs in 2020-2021), affected their performance on the respective categories. Across all four models we found an effect of experience. The more frequently a context was experienced, the better one was at identifying whether a scene was the same. In contrast, performance on frequently encountered scenes in the different conditions were worse, assessed either through accuracy or longer reaction times. Thus, the less familiar the scene, the better one was at identifying differences between scenes. In experiment 2 (N = 49), we tested this by examining the scene perception of students with their home university campus compared to the perception of an unknown university campus. Results of this study replicated the results from experiment 1. Together, we suggest that familiarity of a scene results in fast processing of a scene likely via a gist representation, which may result in the glossing over of details that are processed in an unfamiliar scene.