During visual processing, input that is continuous in space and time is segmented, resulting in the representation of discrete tokens-objects or events. And there has been a great deal of research about how object representations are generalized into types-as when we see an object as an instance of a broader category (e.g., an animal or plant). There has been much less attention, however, to the possibility that vision represents dynamic information in terms of a small number of primitive event types (such as twisting or bouncing). (In models that posit a "language of vision," these would be the foundational visual verbs.) Here we ask whether such event types are extracted spontaneously during visual perception, even when entirely task irrelevant during passive viewing. We exploited the phenomenon of categorical perception-wherein differences are more readily noticed when they are represented in terms of different underlying categories. Observers were better at detecting changes to images or short videos when the changes involved switches in the underlying event type-even when the changes that maintained the same event type were objectively larger (in terms of both brute image metrics and higher level feature change). We observed this categorical "cross-event-type" advantage for visual working memory for twisting versus rotating, scooping versus pouring, and rolling versus bouncing. Moreover, additional control experiments confirmed that such effects could not be explained by appeal to lower-level non-categorical stimulus differences. This spontaneous perception of "visual verbs" might promote both generalization and prediction about how events are likely to unfold. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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“视觉动词”：动态事件类型在视觉感知过程中自发提取。


在视觉处理过程中，在空间和时间上连续的输入被分割，从而产生离散标记对象或事件的表示。关于对象表示如何推广到类型中，已经有大量的研究——比如当我们把一个对象看作一个更广泛类别的实例（例如，动物或植物）时。然而，人们很少关注 vision 以少量原始事件类型（例如扭曲或弹跳）来表示动态信息的可能性。（在假设“视觉语言”的模型中，这些将是基本的视觉动词。在这里，我们询问此类事件类型是否在视觉感知过程中是自发提取的，即使在被动观看期间完全与任务无关。我们利用了分类感知现象——当差异以不同的潜在类别表示时，它们更容易被注意到。当变化涉及底层事件类型的切换时，观察者更擅长检测图像或短视频的变化——即使保持相同事件类型的变化客观上更大（就暴力图像指标和更高级别的特征变化而言）。我们观察到这种分类的 “跨事件类型 ”优势，用于扭转与旋转、舀取与倾倒、滚动与弹跳的视觉工作记忆。此外，额外的对照实验证实，这种效应不能用诉诸较低水平的非分类刺激差异来解释。这种对“视觉动词”的自发感知可能会促进对事件可能如何展开的概括和预测。（PsycInfo 数据库记录 （c） 2024 APA，保留所有权利）。