Incidental visual memory and metamemory for a famous monument

In the context of urban life, some monuments are ecologically relevant landmarks for some people. However, previous research on the topic of incidental memory of everyday settings has relatively ignored how people remember monuments from their environments. The present work examined visual memory (i.e., recall and recognition) and metamemory for the Puerta de Alcalá (“Alcalá Gate” in English), a famous ornamental monument in the city of Madrid (Spain). Despite the monument’s perceptual simplicity, participants showed poor visual memory of it in a recall task (drawings), as only 16% of them correctly drew the monument; moreover, only 45% of the participants correctly recognized it in a four-alternative forced-choice test. In contrast, participants reported higher levels of confidence for both recall and recognition (51.57 ± 20.5 and 79.54 ± 19.6, respectively on a 100-point scale). Importantly, memory performance did not vary as a function of the number of years lived near the monument or of the self-reported contact frequency (familiarity) with the monument. The current findings have relevant implications in understanding the link between visual attention, memory, and metamemory in real-world settings.