Title: Natural scenes are more compressible and less memorable than man-made scenes
Nakwon Rim, doctoral student in the Berman Lab, Department of Psychology, University of Chicago
Abstract: Compressing the information from the environment to fit our processing capacity is an essential function of our cognition. However, some environments may be easier to compress for us than others, keenly relating to how taxing the environment is. In this paper, we investigate this environmental variation of compressibility in the visual domain along the dimension of naturalness. Across three human experiments, we quantified the compressibility of the natural and man-made scenes utilizing spatial frequency and sharpness of edges. Aligning with previous work on the benefits of interacting with nature, natural scenes were more compressible than man-made scenes. Furthermore, we used memorability as a behavioral proxy of how much information from the scene got processed into memory. Matching the compressibility result, we found that natural scenes are less memorable. Finally, we trained a neural network that predicts the naturalness of scenes and replicated the results in a large-scale scene database with more than 100,000 images. Our results shed important insight into our cognitive process and human-environment interaction, most notably on the beneficial effect of interacting with nature.
Time: 10/02/24 3:30 PM
Location: Biopsychological Sciences Building atrium
If you have any questions, requests, and concerns, please contact Nakwon Rim (nwrim [at] uchicago [dot] edu) or Cambria Revsine (crevsine [at] uchicago [dot] edu).