Biederman, I., Rabinowitz, J. C., Glass, A. L. & Stacey, E. W. J. (1974). On the information extracted from a glance at a scene. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 103(3), 597-600.

Pictures of jumbled and coherent versions of real-world scenes were shown for durations of 20-300 msec. In Experiment I, Ss selected that label from a pair of labels which they judged to better describe the scene. The more similar the label pairs, the less accurate were the choices. In Experiment II, a cue was presented immediately after the scene which designated one of the objects in the scene. Jumbling reduced both the accuracy of identification of the cued objects and the accuracy of descriptor choice in Experiment I. The results are discussed in terms of two kinds of information that O extracts from a single fixation of a scene: (a) individual objects and (b) an overall characterization of the scene.