[Article] Hierarchical organization of objects in scenes is reflected in mental representations of objects
summary: This study explored how the hierarchical structure of scene grammar is reflected in our object recognition. Scenes are divided into several “phrases,” each consisting of a central “anchor” object and its surrounding “local objects.” Participants consistently judged object pairs within the same phrase to be more similar, and this tendency was observed across both images and words. This demonstrates that the hierarchical structure of the visual environment is integrated into our abstract mental representations. Consequently, this study is expected to provide insights into how stimuli can be extracted from natural scene data, such as COCO images.