Laboratory of Brain and Cognition, National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, MD 20814, USA.
Laboratory of Brain and Cognition, National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, MD 20814, USA.
Curr Biol. 2020 Feb 3;30(3):537-543.e3. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2019.12.004. Epub 2020 Jan 23.
Boundary extension, a memory distortion in which observers consistently recall a scene with visual information beyond its boundaries, is widely accepted across the psychological sciences as a phenomenon revealing fundamental insight into memory representations [1-3], robust across paradigms [1, 4] and age groups [5-7]. This phenomenon has been taken to suggest that the mental representation of a scene consists of an intermingling of sensory information and a schema that extrapolates the views of a presented scene [8], and it has been used to provide evidence for the role of the neocortex [9] and hippocampus [10, 11] in the schematization of scenes during memory. However, the study of boundary extension has typically focused on object-oriented images that are not representative of our visuospatial world. Here, using a broad set of 1,000 images tested on 2,000 participants in a rapid recognition task, we discover "boundary contraction" as an equally robust phenomenon. Further, image composition largely drives whether extension or contraction is observed-although object-oriented images cause more boundary extension, scene-oriented images cause more boundary contraction. Finally, these effects also occur during drawing tasks, including a task with minimal memory load-when participants copy an image during viewing. Collectively, these results show that boundary extension is not a universal phenomenon and put into question the assumption that scene memory automatically combines visual information with additional context derived from internal schema. Instead, our memory for a scene may be largely driven by its visual composition, with a tendency to extend or contract the boundaries equally likely.
边界延伸是一种记忆扭曲现象，观察者会一致地回忆起超出场景边界的视觉信息。这种现象在心理学领域被广泛接受，被认为是揭示记忆表象基本原理的现象[1-3]，在范式[1,4]和年龄组[5-7]中都具有稳健性。这种现象表明，场景的心理表象由感官信息和一个推断呈现场景视角的图式的混合体组成[8]，并且它被用于提供证据表明新皮质[9]和海马体[10,11]在场景记忆的图式化过程中的作用。然而，边界延伸的研究通常集中在非代表性的面向物体的图像上，而不是我们的视觉空间世界。在这里，我们使用了一个由 1000 张图像组成的广泛数据集，在快速识别任务中对 2000 名参与者进行了测试，发现了“边界收缩”这一同样稳健的现象。此外，图像组成在很大程度上决定了观察到的是延伸还是收缩——尽管面向物体的图像会导致更多的边界延伸，但面向场景的图像会导致更多的边界收缩。最后，这些效应也会出现在绘画任务中，包括一个记忆负荷最小的任务——当参与者在观看时复制图像时。总的来说，这些结果表明边界延伸不是一种普遍现象，并对场景记忆自动将视觉信息与内部图式衍生的额外背景结合的假设提出了质疑。相反，我们对场景的记忆可能主要由其视觉组成驱动，扩展或收缩边界的趋势同样可能出现。
