Object-based attention during scene perception elicits boundary contraction in memory

Hall, Elizabeth H.; Geng, Joy J. · 2024 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.3758/s13421-024-01540-9

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Summary

This study investigates how selective attention during scene perception influences boundary transformations in memory, specifically testing the hypothesis that focusing on specific objects leads to boundary contraction. While previous research established that viewers often extrapolate scene boundaries (boundary extension) or forget edge details (boundary contraction), it remained unclear whether these effects are driven by image composition or the viewer’s attentional state. The authors propose that task-induced attention distribution at encoding determines the direction of memory transformation, with object-focused attention causing memory to contract around the attended item. To test this, the researchers conducted an experiment with 72 undergraduate participants divided into two groups: a search condition (N=36) and a memorize condition (N=36). Both groups viewed the same 15 computer-generated scene images. Participants in the search condition were instructed to find and click on a specific target object within each scene, while those in the memorize condition simply viewed the scenes for a duration matched to the search group’s average viewing time. After a delay, all participants drew the scenes from memory. Eye-tracking data recorded fixation patterns during encoding, and online scorers rated the drawings for boundary transformation, object presence, and object size/location. The results demonstrated that selective attention significantly altered memory representations. Drawings from the search condition exhibited significantly greater boundary contraction (62.3%) compared to the memorize condition, which showed equal rates of contraction and extension. Eye-tracking confirmed that search participants fixated significantly less of the scene overall but spent substantially more time fixating the target object. Consequently, search participants were far more likely to recall the target object (80.4% of drawings) than memorize participants (19.4%). Furthermore, the likelihood of recalling non-target objects in the search condition decreased as their distance from the target increased, indicating a memory representation centered on the attended object. In contrast, memorize participants showed a bias toward recalling objects near the image center. Additionally, objects in search drawings were rendered significantly larger than in the original images, consistent with a contracted viewpoint. These findings indicate that boundary transformations in scene memory are not fixed properties of images but are dynamically shaped by how attention is distributed during encoding. Selective attention to a specific object causes memory to contract around that object, leading to the forgetting of peripheral details and the overestimation of the target’s size. This suggests that the cognitive goal during perception—whether processing a specific object or the scene as a whole—directly dictates the spatial fidelity and boundary limits of subsequent memory representations.

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• inattentional change blindness