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False memories when viewing overlapping scenes

Humans can memorize and later recognize many objects and complex scenes. In this study, we prepared large photographs and presented participants with only partial views to test the fidelity of their memories. The unpresented parts of the photographs were used as a source of distractors with similar...

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Autores principales: Děchtěrenko, Filip, Lukavský, Jiří
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: PeerJ Inc. 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8994494/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35411252
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.13187
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author Děchtěrenko, Filip
Lukavský, Jiří
author_facet Děchtěrenko, Filip
Lukavský, Jiří
author_sort Děchtěrenko, Filip
collection PubMed
description Humans can memorize and later recognize many objects and complex scenes. In this study, we prepared large photographs and presented participants with only partial views to test the fidelity of their memories. The unpresented parts of the photographs were used as a source of distractors with similar semantic and perceptual information. Additionally, we presented overlapping views to determine whether the second presentation provided a memory advantage for later recognition tests. Experiment 1 (N = 28) showed that while people were good at recognizing presented content and identifying new foils, they showed a remarkable level of uncertainty about foils selected from the unseen parts of presented photographs (false alarm, 59%). The recognition accuracy was higher for the parts that were shown twice, irrespective of whether the same identical photograph was viewed twice or whether two photographs with overlapping content were observed. In Experiment 2 (N = 28), the memorability of the large image was estimated by a pre-trained deep neural network. Neither the recognition accuracy for an image part nor the tendency for false alarms correlated with the memorability. Finally, in Experiment 3 (N = 21), we repeated the experiment while measuring eye movements. Fixations were biased toward the center of the original large photograph in the first presentation, and this bias was repeated during the second presentation in both identical and overlapping views. Altogether, our experiments show that people recognize parts of remembered photographs, but they find it difficult to reject foils from unseen parts, suggesting that their memory representation is not sufficiently detailed to rule them out as distractors.
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spelling pubmed-89944942022-04-10 False memories when viewing overlapping scenes Děchtěrenko, Filip Lukavský, Jiří PeerJ Psychiatry and Psychology Humans can memorize and later recognize many objects and complex scenes. In this study, we prepared large photographs and presented participants with only partial views to test the fidelity of their memories. The unpresented parts of the photographs were used as a source of distractors with similar semantic and perceptual information. Additionally, we presented overlapping views to determine whether the second presentation provided a memory advantage for later recognition tests. Experiment 1 (N = 28) showed that while people were good at recognizing presented content and identifying new foils, they showed a remarkable level of uncertainty about foils selected from the unseen parts of presented photographs (false alarm, 59%). The recognition accuracy was higher for the parts that were shown twice, irrespective of whether the same identical photograph was viewed twice or whether two photographs with overlapping content were observed. In Experiment 2 (N = 28), the memorability of the large image was estimated by a pre-trained deep neural network. Neither the recognition accuracy for an image part nor the tendency for false alarms correlated with the memorability. Finally, in Experiment 3 (N = 21), we repeated the experiment while measuring eye movements. Fixations were biased toward the center of the original large photograph in the first presentation, and this bias was repeated during the second presentation in both identical and overlapping views. Altogether, our experiments show that people recognize parts of remembered photographs, but they find it difficult to reject foils from unseen parts, suggesting that their memory representation is not sufficiently detailed to rule them out as distractors. PeerJ Inc. 2022-04-06 /pmc/articles/PMC8994494/ /pubmed/35411252 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.13187 Text en © 2022 Děchtěrenko and Lukavský https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
spellingShingle Psychiatry and Psychology
Děchtěrenko, Filip
Lukavský, Jiří
False memories when viewing overlapping scenes
title False memories when viewing overlapping scenes
title_full False memories when viewing overlapping scenes
title_fullStr False memories when viewing overlapping scenes
title_full_unstemmed False memories when viewing overlapping scenes
title_short False memories when viewing overlapping scenes
title_sort false memories when viewing overlapping scenes
topic Psychiatry and Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8994494/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35411252
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.13187
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