Measuring the Typicality of Objects Included in Environmental Scenes: A Logistic Model for Atypicality

Abstract

Some empirical studies have stated that people usually categorize scenes according to the suitability of their elements. This paper proposes a method of measuring the typicality of naturalistic objects contained in environmental scenes. 517 subjects gave a score of suitability for 110 object-scene pairs. We used a logistic model for the measurements which enabled us to obtain two indexes, atypicality and discrimination. Analysis showed that the objects could be arranged on a numerical scale according to their typicality in a scene, and from this we concluded that logistic models are a useful and powerful method of measuring typicality.