Dipartimento di Psicologia, Universitá di Bologna, Viale Berti Pichat, 5, 40127, Bologna, Italy.
Abteilung Allgemeine Psychologie, Justus-Liebig Universität Giessen, Giessen, Germany.
Psychol Res. 2021 Feb;85(1):246-258. doi: 10.1007/s00426-019-01247-6. Epub 2019 Sep 17.
Being confronted with the depiction of a familiar object activates a number of properties of the object that are stored in memory. Memory properties such as color and size have been shown to interfere with the processing of the color and of the size of the depiction, so that that reaction times are longer when the color or size of the depiction are incongruent with the stored knowledge about the object. In the case of color, it is known that the memorized information also affects the appearance of the depiction, for example when a gray banana appears slightly yellow, a phenomenon known as memory color effect. Here, I tested whether a memory size effect also occurs. To this aim, I conducted one experiment where observers matched either the screen size or the real-world size of pairs of animals or vehicles. The results indicate that the screen matches are biased in the same direction as the real-world size matches, opposite of what would be predicted by a memory color effect. This result was replicated in a second experiment using a different and larger set of animal images. Overall, I confirm that observers cannot ignore the real-world size information when they attempt to match the screen size of two items, although this results in a bias towards the canonical size of the items, rather than in a memory size effect.
面对熟悉物体的描绘会激活储存在记忆中的物体的许多属性。已经表明，颜色和大小等记忆属性会干扰对描绘的颜色和大小的处理，因此当描绘的颜色或大小时，反应时间会更长与物体的存储知识不一致。在颜色的情况下，已知记忆信息也会影响描绘的外观，例如当灰色香蕉看起来略带黄色时，这种现象称为记忆颜色效应。在这里，我测试了是否也会发生记忆大小效应。为此，我进行了一项实验，其中观察者匹配了动物或车辆对的屏幕大小或实际大小。结果表明，屏幕匹配的方向与实际大小匹配的方向相同，与记忆颜色效应的预测相反。在使用不同且更大的动物图像集的第二个实验中复制了该结果。总的来说，我确认观察者在尝试匹配两个项目的屏幕大小时不能忽略实际大小信息，尽管这导致了对项目规范大小的偏向，而不是记忆大小效应。
