In Sight, Out of Mind: When Object Representations Fail

Models of human visual memory often presuppose an extraordinary ability to recognize and identify objects, based on evidence for nearly flawless recognition of hundreds or even thousands of pictures after a single presentation (Nickerson, 1965, Shepard, 1967, Standing, Conezio, & Haber, 1970) and for storage of tens of thousands of object representations over the course of a lifetime (Biederman, 1987) However, recent evidence suggests that observers often fail to notice dramatic changes to scenes, especially changes occurring during eye movements (e g, Grimes, 1996) The experiments presented here show that immediate memory for object identity is surprisingly poor, especially when verbal labeling is prevented However, memory for the spatial configuration of objects remains excellent even with verbal interference suggesting a fundamental difference between representations of spatial configuration and object properties

[1]  E. C. Cherry.  Some Experiments on the Recognition of Speech, with One and with Two Ears , 1953 .

[2]  Anne Treisman,et al.  Monitoring and storage of irrelevant messages in selective attention , 1964 .

[3]  R. Nickerson,et al.  SHORT-TERM MEMORY FOR COMPLEX MEANINGFUL VISUAL CONFIGURATIONS: A DEMONSTRATION OF CAPACITY. , 1965, Canadian journal of psychology.

[4]  R. Shepard.  Recognition memory for words, sentences, and pictures , 1967 .

[5]  R. Haber,et al.  Perception and memory for pictures: Single-trial learning of 2500 visual stimuli , 1970 .

[6]  R. Nickerson,et al.  Long-term memory for a common object , 1979, Cognitive Psychology.

[7]  J. Gibson.  The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception , 1979 .

[8]  H. Intraub.  Rapid conceptual identification of sequentially presented pictures. , 1981 .

[9]  Leslie G. Ungerleider,et al.  Object vision and spatial vision: two cortical pathways , 1983, Trends in Neurosciences.

[10]  I. Biederman.  Recognition-by-components: a theory of human image understanding. , 1987, Psychological review.

[11]  H Pashler,et al.  Familiarity and visual change detection , 1988, Perception & psychophysics.

[12]  A Pollatsek,et al.  Role of spatial location in integration of pictorial information across saccades. , 1990, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[13]  Alexander Pollatsek,et al.  What Is Integrated Across Fixations , 1992 .

[14]  J. O'Regan,et al.  Solving the "real" mysteries of visual perception: the world as an outside memory. , 1992, Canadian journal of psychology.

[15]  J. Grimes.  On the failure to detect changes in scenes across saccades. , 1996 .