Scene consistency enhances state representations of real-world objects

Previous research has shown that the context in which objects are located significantly influences how efficiently they are categorized. However, less is known about whether scene consistency can also affect the processing of finer object features, such as the state of an object (e.g., the angle of a Swiss army knife or the fill level of a bottle). Therefore, across three experiments, we presented a subset of the JURICS stimulus set, in which each object exists in 20 continuously varying states (e.g., from fully closed to fully open) in scenes that were either contextually consistent or inconsistent. Participants were asked to report the specific state of the object using a continuous report task. Our results showed that scene consistency enhanced the precision of state judgments; that is, participants made significantly larger errors in reporting object states when objects were presented in inconsistent compared to consistent scenes. These findings suggest that scene context exhibits its effect already at the level of fine-grained perceptual processing of objects, affecting not only object categorization but also the accuracy of its perceived features.