Navigational affordances emerge stably with brief stimulus exposure despite changes in scene content

Abstract

Everyday life requires successful navigation often through complex and dynamic environments. The ability to identify efficient and safe routes of egress through scenes relies on perception of the navigational affordances of scenes. Recent behavioral work identified that navigational affordances of indoor urban environments can emerge with as little as 33 to 66 ms of stimulus presentation but only become stable with 132 ms and beyond. Here, we extend this to investigate the temporal emergence of navigational affordances using a more heterogeneous stimulus set that includes both indoor urban and outdoor environments (both person-made and natural). We observed an almost identical pattern of results to prior work: navigational affordances were emergent rapidly (∼66 ms) and stabilized with as little as 132 ms of stimulus exposure. This pattern was also evident when considering the outdoor scenes in isolation. Taken together, these data suggest that the human visual system is capable of forming stable navigationally relevant representations for maximal behavioral relevance rapidly.