Incidental visual memory and metamemory for a famous monument

Abstract

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.

Memory and metamemory in everyday settings: Assessing recall, recognition, and naming using car brand logos

“…Moreover, in the naming task (Study 2), participants perfectly matched their confidence judgments and performance, an expected result given that the logo is a powerful retrieval cue for the brand name, as both are often presented together in real life (see Iancu & Iancu, 2017;Montoro & Ruiz, 2022 for similar results).…”

“…Findings have shown a dissociation between poor performance in recall and recognition tasks of everyday settings and the overconfidence shown by participants, which has been replicated in several studies (e.g. Blake & Castel, 2019; Blake et al, 2015; Montoro & Ruiz, 2022). This pattern of results replicates the findings typically obtained in experimental studies using less naturalistic materials (see Dunlosky & Metcalfe, 2008, for a review).…”

“…The modified logos were created by changing the simple features of the original logo (e.g., orientation, number of elements, relationship between elements, and presence or absence of geometric shapes) (see Figure 2). In line with Montoro and Ruiz (2022), the participants had to rank logos on a "scale of reality" from "the most similar or realistic version" to "the less similar or less realistic version" by allotting numbers from 1 to 6, respectively. The response was forced, and the numbers could not be repeated.…”

“…To explain the dissociation between the virtually unlimited visual memory capacity for repeatedly presented objects (Brady et al, 2008) and the poor memory for everyday settings reported in the previous literature, two different accounts have been proposed (see Castel et al, 2015; Montoro & Ruiz, 2022, for reviews). The first one focuses on attentional mechanisms.…”

“…Moreover, in a study by Blake et al (2015), the drawings of the Apple logo often exhibited features collected from real apples. In addition, Montoro and Ruiz (2022) found that participants' drawings of a famous monument contained intrusions from a prototypical overgeneralized schema for the concept of the “monumental gate” from Madrid.…”