Abstract: The main purpose of scene perception is to investigate how people perceive and process complex real-world scene information. Objects and background elements are the necessary parts of scene. Furthermore, according to the complexity and reality of the stimuli, meaningless figures or letters, sequences of objects, 3D pictures, and real-world environment could be used as stimuli in scene perception. Previous studies of scene perception mainly used top-down and bottom-up processing to explain the scene perception. Surprisingly, more and more researchers emphasize the interaction of top-down and bottom-up. Based on different purpose of experiments and techniques they used, researchers use different paradigms to study how we perceive and process scenes. These paradigms include eye movement, object detection, contextual cueing, change detection, and follow-the-dot. Further studies should pay more attention to definition of scene perception, relationship of different paradigms, internal validity, and processing patterns of different cognitive stages

Key words: scene perception, processing pattern, paradigm