Objects sharpen visual scene representations: evidence from MEG decoding

Real-world scenes consist of objects, defined by local information, and scene background, defined by global information. Although objects and scenes are processed in separate pathways in visual cortex, their processing interacts. Specifically, previous studies have shown that scene context makes blurry objects look sharper, an effect that can be observed as a sharpening of object representations in visual cortex from around 300 ms after stimulus onset. Here, we use MEG to show that objects can also sharpen scene representations, with the same temporal profile. Photographs of indoor (closed) and outdoor (open) scenes were blurred such that they were difficult to categorize on their own but easily disambiguated by the inclusion of an object. Classifiers were trained to distinguish MEG response patterns to intact indoor and outdoor scenes, presented in an independent run, and tested on degraded scenes in the main experiment. Results revealed better decoding of scenes with objects than scenes alone and objects alone from 300 ms after stimulus onset. This effect was strongest over left posterior sensors. These findings show that the influence of objects on scene representations occurs at similar latencies as the influence of scenes on object representations, in line with a common predictive processing mechanism.