Journal article
Surprise! Draw the scene: Visual recall reveals poor incidental working memory following visual search in natural scenes
MEMORY & COGNITION
28 Sep 2023
PMID: 37770695
Abstract
Searching within natural scenes can induce incidental encoding of information about the scene and the target, particularly when the scene is complex or repeated. However, recent evidence from attribute amnesia (AA) suggests that in some situations, searchers can find a target without building a robust incidental memory of it's task relevant features. Through drawing-based visual recall and an AA search task, we investigated whether search in natural scenes necessitates memory encoding. Participants repeatedly searched for and located an easily detected item in novel scenes for numerous trials before being unexpectedly prompted to draw either the entire scene (Experiment 1) or their search target (Experiment 2) directly after viewing the search image. Naive raters assessed the similarity of the drawings to the original information. We found that surprise-trial drawings of the scene and search target were both poorly recognizable, but the same drawers produced highly recognizable drawings on the next trial when they had an expectation to draw the image. Experiment 3 further showed that the poor surprise trial memory could not merely be attributed to interference from the surprising event. Our findings suggest that even for searches done in natural scenes, it is possible to locate a target without creating a robust memory of either it or the scene it was in, even if attended to just a few seconds prior. This disconnection between attention and memory might reflect a fundamental property of cognitive computations designed to optimize task performance and minimize resource use.
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Details
- Title
- Surprise! Draw the scene: Visual recall reveals poor incidental working memory following visual search in natural scenes
- Publication Details
- MEMORY & COGNITION
- Publisher
- SPRINGER; NEW YORK
- Grant note
- The authors would like to thank Taryn Green, Dheeraj Varghese, and Moussa Kousa for their assistance in completing this research project. This work was supported by NSF Grant 1734220 awarded to author B.W
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Drexel University
- Web of Science ID
- WOS:001074837800001
- Scopus ID
- 2-s2.0-85172910821
- Other Identifier
- 991021860619504721
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- Collaboration types
- Domestic collaboration
- Web of Science research areas
- Psychology, Experimental