The Concept Of Model Of Scene Perception And Long-Term Memory

Introduction

Previous research has shown that participants viewing a scene are able to very accurately remember a large number of formerly seen photographs, where theoretical models that “cover functions such as … pattern recognition, scene assembly, analysis of spatial relations and object search”. Other such models include the multistore model of memory (MSM) proposed by Atkinson and Shifrrin (1968), which includes the sensory stores and short-term stores. Law, Halkiopoulos, Bryan (2010) state that “all information picked up by our senses enters its corresponding sensory store and registers in a code reflecting its initial form” although “sensory stores have unlimited capacity, information in them decays rapidly and is soon lost”, where iconic memory “lasts from a fraction of a second to 1 second.” However, the STS has an extremely limited capacity and can only store around seven units of information at one time plus or minus 2 units.

Other studies, such as Nickerson and Raymond S. (1965), suggested that short-term memory and the ability to remember, “recognize, complex meaningful visual configurations” was “very high even with as many as 200 items intervening between its 1st and 2nd occurrence”. This means that after looking at an image in the short term, participants are able to remember many details of this image. Castelhano and Henderson (2010) investigated “whether long-term visual memory would be observed for objects that were incidentally encoded during scene viewing”. Their instructions were similar to those of Hollingworth and Henderson (2002), who researched “the nature of the information retained from previously fixated (and hence attended) objects in natural scenes”. Hollingworth and Henderson concluded that “relatively detailed visual information is retained in memory from previously attended objects in natural scenes”, which led them to propose a “model of scene perception and long-term memory.” Therefore, according to these findings, participants should be able to recall a whole scene they have memories of better than when they were looking for a specific object.

Castelhano and Henderson’s (2010) Experiment 1 included a memory test that “involved discriminating between a previously seen critical object drawn from each scene and another foil object that was a different token of the same basic-level category type.” Experiment 2 had participants “discriminate between the previously viewed orientation of the critical object and a mirror-reversal distractor version of the same object. Both Experiment 1 and 2 had the participants take part in “both the memorization and visual search tasks.”

In Experiment 3, “a between-participant version of Experiment 1 was conducted in which each participant was given only one of the two study conditions to ensure that there was no contamination from memorization to visual search.” For each experiment, 20 Michigan State University students were asked to participate. In Experiment 1, participants received credit for an introductory psychology course, in experiment 3, participants received $7 for participating, and in Experiment 2, the participants received either the credit or the money. The aim of the study was to research whether participants are better at remembering certain objects in a scene if they were looking for a specific object or if they were looking at the whole picture. Both trials had different images and participants were asked to differentiate between an object that was in the picture or the same object taken from a different image and answer which was in the picture on an online quiz. All participants knew they would be tested on their memory. This is an interesting question to study because it could help the way we think students’ short-term memory works and could help with studying.

The null hypothesis is that there will be no significant difference in how well students remembered the objects in the picture whether they were looking at the whole picture or for a specific object. The research hypothesis is that students who looked at the whole picture should be better at differentiating between the object that was in the scene and the object that was not. The independent variables are whether the participant looked at the whole image or for a specific object, and the dependent variable is how well they were able to recall which of the objects was in the picture.