Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2025 Jan 3;57(1):42.
doi: 10.3758/s13428-024-02535-9.

The Visual Integration of Semantic and Spatial Information of Objects in Naturalistic Scenes (VISIONS) database: attentional, conceptual, and perceptual norms

Elena Allegretti  1 , Giorgia D'Innocenzo  2 , Moreno I Coco  3   4
Affiliations

The Visual Integration of Semantic and Spatial Information of Objects in Naturalistic Scenes (VISIONS) database: attentional, conceptual, and perceptual norms

Elena Allegretti et al. Behav Res Methods. .

Abstract

The complex interplay between low- and high-level mechanisms governing our visual system can only be fully understood within ecologically valid naturalistic contexts. For this reason, in recent years, substantial efforts have been devoted to equipping the scientific community with datasets of realistic images normed on semantic or spatial features. Here, we introduce VISIONS, an extensive database of 1136 naturalistic scenes normed on a wide range of perceptual and conceptual norms by 185 English speakers across three levels of granularity: isolated object, whole scene, and object-in-scene. Each naturalistic scene contains a critical object systematically manipulated and normed regarding its semantic consistency (e.g., a toothbrush vs. a flashlight in a bathroom) and spatial position (i.e., left, right). Normative data are also available for low- (i.e., clarity, visual complexity) and high-level (i.e., name agreement, confidence, familiarity, prototypicality, manipulability) features of the critical object and its embedding scene context. Eye-tracking data during a free-viewing task further confirms the experimental validity of our manipulations while theoretically demonstrating that object semantics is acquired in extra-foveal vision and used to guide early overt attention. To our knowledge, VISIONS is the first database exhaustively covering norms about integrating objects in scenes and providing several perceptual and conceptual norms of the two as independently taken. We expect VISIONS to become an invaluable image dataset to examine and answer timely questions above and beyond vision science, where a diversity of perceptual, attentive, mnemonic, or linguistic processes could be explored as they develop, age, or become neuropathological.

Keywords: Eye movements; Norms; Object-scene integration; Scene database; Semantic consistency; Spatial location.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

Declarations. Conflict of interests/Competing interests: The authors have no competing interests to declare relevant to this manuscript’s content. Ethics approval: The study was performed in accordance with the ethical standards laid down in the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki. Ethical approval was obtained from the School of Psychology Research Ethics Committee of the University of East London and the Ethics Committee for Transdisciplinary Research of Sapienza University of Rome. Consent to participate: All participants consented before starting the normative session, and their responses were collected anonymously to protect their privacy. Consent for publication: The authors affirm that all participants provided informed consent for the publication of their data.

References

    1. Anderson, N. C., Ort, E., Kruijne, W., Meeter, M., & Donk, M. (2015). It depends on when you look at it: Salience influences eye movements in natural scene viewing and search early in time. Journal of Vision, 15(5), 9. https://doi.org/10.1167/15.5.9 - DOI - PubMed
    1. Andrade, M. Â., Cipriano, M., & Raposo, A. (2023). ObScene database: Semantic congruency norms for 898 pairs of object–scene pictures. Behavior Research Methods, https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-023-02181-7 . Advance online publication.
    1. Bainbridge, W. A., Hall, E. H., & Baker, C. I. (2019). Drawings of real-world scenes during free recall reveal detailed object and spatial information in memory. Nature Communications, 10(1), 5. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-07830-6 - DOI - PubMed - PMC
    1. Bar, M. (2004). Visual objects in context. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 5, 617–629. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn1476 - DOI - PubMed
    1. Barr, D. J., Levy, R., Scheepers, C., & Tily, H. J. (2013). Random effects structure for confirmatory hypothesis testing: Keep it maximal. Journal of Memory and Language, 68(3), 255–278. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2012.11.001 - DOI

Publication types

LinkOut - more resources