Journal Article

Enhanced Memory for Scenes Presented at Behaviorally Relevant Points in Time

Murray, Scott O., Pype, Amanda D., Lin, Jeffrey Y., Boynton, Geoffrey M.

2010

Overview

The ability to remember a briefly presented scene depends on a number of factors, such as its saliency, novelty, degree of threat, or behavioral relevance to a task. Here, however, we show that the encoding of a scene into memory may depend not only on what the scene contains but also when it occurs. Participants performed an attentionally demanding target detection task at fixation while also viewing a rapid sequence of full-field photographs of urban and natural scenes. Participants were then tested on whether they recognized a specific scene from the previous sequence. We found that scenes were recognized reliably only when presented concurrently with a target at fixation. This is evidence of a mechanism where traces of a visual scene are automatically encoded into memory at behaviorally relevant points in time regardless of the spatial focus of attention.

• Publisher: Public Library of Science,Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subject: Behavior - physiology / Cognition & reasoning / Experiments / Female / Humans / Hypotheses / Letters / Male / Memory / Memory - physiology / Neuropsychological Tests / Neuroscience / Neuroscience/Cognitive Neuroscience / Neuroscience/Psychology / Neuroscience/Sensory Systems / Pattern Recognition, Visual / Psychomotor Performance - physiology / Scene perception / Visual Perception - physiology