Unifying scene-object congruency and incongruency benefits in object perception.

While the influence of scene-object semantic congruency on object perception is well established, the direction of the influence remains controversial. We address this issue by presenting an innovative approach that uses a vector-space semantic model to quantify scene-object congruency as a continuous variable. By exploring a wide range of congruency values and using multiple experimental tasks, we aimed to comprehensively investigate the relationship between scene-object congruency and object perception across four experiments (N = 543). We found a robust positive U-shaped relationship between scene-object congruency and accuracy in an exemplar identification task (Experiment 1), which persisted across different stimulus sets (reanalysis of the previous data set) and scene presentation times (Experiment 2). To explore the mechanisms underlying the U-shaped relationship, we propose that scene-object congruency affects object perception in two ways: by influencing attention and thus processing amount and by directly influencing processing efficiency. In Experiment 3, a change detection task emphasizing attentional processes revealed an inverted U-shaped relationship between congruency and reaction times, suggesting that both congruent and incongruent contexts improve object perception by increasing attention. Experiment 4 introduced a cue to neutralize congruency-based attention, focusing on processing efficiency in an identification task. Notably, only a congruency benefit emerged, while an incongruency benefit was absent, suggesting that congruency uniquely facilitates processing efficiency to improve object perception. In summary, our study provides compelling evidence for the coexistence of congruency and incongruency benefits, reconciling previous contradictions and providing a unifying framework for understanding the relationship between scene-object congruency and object perception. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).