Understanding novel, real world scenes: Gist strength and the riches beyond

What happens when a full-color scene is shown to observers for 2 sec, followed by a written report describing what was perceived? Such full-report methods reveal that there is a shared perception of gist, as well as deeper perception that extends far beyond gist. We applied the method to a new set of 8 naturalistic scenes. The responses were accurate descriptions of stimulus content, validated against the scenes. Gist strength was measured by the frequency of the most common concepts in the scene-descriptions, and exceeded 80% for most scenes, but not all. The new findings are what is beyond gist: elaborations of the scenes, which constitute breadth of interpretation. Breadth was measured by counting distinct “aspects of interpretation” in the descriptions of each scene — aspects having have noticeably different and correct meanings. The number of aspects varied widely across scenes, ranging from 10 aspects for one scene (6 surfers riding a wave), to over 40 aspects for two otherwise ordinary scenes (a bench in a room, and an old wall and door). The aspects differed in multiple ways, including main objects and features, size scale, contextualization and attitude, and labels. The differing aspects suggest that perceptual experience of the world is partly idiosyncratic, driven by qualities of the perceiver. In other words, people see (somewhat) differently.