Anchor objects drive realism while diagnostic objects drive categorization in GAN generated scenes

Our visual surroundings are highly complex. Despite this, we understand and navigate them effortlessly. This requires transforming incoming sensory information into representations that not only span low- to high-level visual features (e.g., edges, object parts, objects), but likely also reflect co-occurrence statistics of objects in real-world scenes. Here, so-called anchor objects are defined as being highly predictive of the location and identity of frequently co-occuring (usually smaller) objects, derived from object clustering statistics in real-world scenes, while so-called diagnostic objects are predictive of the larger semantic context (i.e., scene category). Across two studies (N1 = 50, N2 = 44), we investigate which of these properties underlie scene understanding across two dimensions – realism and categorisation – using scenes generated from Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) which naturally vary along these dimensions. We show that anchor objects and mainly high-level features extracted from a range of pre-trained deep neural networks (DNNs) drove realism both at first glance and after initial processing. Categorisation performance was mainly determined by diagnostic objects, regardless of realism, at first glance and after initial processing. Our results are testament to the visual system’s ability to pick up on reliable, category specific sources of information that are flexible towards disturbances across the visual feature-hierarchy. Human observers rate Generative Adversarial Network scenes as more realistic if they contain appropriate anchor objects, while scene categorization relies on diagnostic objects.