Can we distinguish briefly-presented natural scenes equated in summary statistics and semantic meaning?

Our visual experience feels rich, yet early studies suggested that what we can report about the experience is limited to 3~4 items at a glance. To reconcile this discrepancy, some studies argued that our momentary experience is a compressed summary of the visual inputs, which allows us to understand the general semantic meaning (gist) of the scene, creating an impression of richness despite lacking in details. Conversely, others proposed that our experience is perceptually rich and specific, but we have a limited ability to access and describe its details in words. To distinguish between these possibilities, we invented a novel psychophysics paradigm to examine whether participants can discriminate between images that are equated both on semantic gists and summary statistics. For each of 100 natural scenes, we synthesised an image with matched summary statistics. In Experiment 1 (N = 100, completed), we collected gist descriptions for each image, and evaluated whether each image pair is semantically-equivalent. Using these image pairs equated in both gists and summary statistics, in a series of registered Experiments, we will perform a perceptual discrimination task on online participants and in-lab participants with immersive displays. Overall, our experiments will investigate whether our experience contains perceptual details that cannot be described in words.