Memory for descriptive and spatial information in complex pictures.

Mandler, Jean M.; Parker, Richard

doi:10.1037/0278-7393.2.1.38

Cited by 129 publications

(112 citation statements)

References 11 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

102

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…While it is not yet possible to fully specify the contents of scene schemata, Biederman's (1980) research with scene "violations" indicates that rules specifying such interobject relations as support, interposition, probability, object position, and size are inherent in our scene schemata. In their studies of recognition memory for scenes, Mandler and her colleagues (Mandler & Johnson, 1976;Mandler & Parker, 1976;Mandler & Ritchey, 1977) have provided evidence that scene schemata can involve information concerning the spatial composition of scenes (where objects are located) and the spatial relations between the objects. The results of the present research show that scene schemata can involve information specifying the spatial locations of objects that have never appeared in any of the visual stimuli (the camera).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The abstraction of schematic representations from photographs of real-world scenes

Hock

Schmelzkopf

1980

Memory & Cognition

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Photographs of a downtown street scene were taken from four different locations. At each location the photographs were taken in 12 different directions, 30 deg apart. In the acquisition phase of the experiments, subjects learned to identify the photographs in terms of the location from which they were taken. The testing phase took place immediately after acquisition, after a I-week delay, after a 6-month delay, and on one occasion after a l-year delay. Subjects were tested for their ability to identify the camera location for previously seen and new photographs, to discriminate previously seen from new photographs (i.e., recognition), and to place the camera locations on a map of the street scene. The results of six experiments provided converging evidence that subjects abstracted a schematic representation of the spatial layout of the scene from the discrete, partially overlapping photographic samples presented during acquisition.When we perceive a three-dimensional real-world scene we do not extract visual information from the scene in a complete, continuous fashion. Saccadic eye movements and abrupt changes in head and body position produce discrete, partially overlapping samples of the visual field. Nonetheless, our experience of the scene is integrated and continuous. The traditional explanation for this phenomenon asserts that motor information (either efferent or afferent) specifying the direction of gaze for each of a series of fixations is used to "fit" the samples of visual information extracted during each fixation into a continuous, composite representation of the scene (Helmholtz, 1866(Helmholtz, /1963 Walls, 1951). This explanation, however, has been effectively refuted by Hochberg's (1978) observation that we can integrate successive, partially overlapping visual samples in perceiving motion pictures despite discontinuous transitions in camera location and direction. The discontinuous transitions are integrated without the perceiver's havingaccessto information specifying either the locations or "directions of gaze" of the camera.

show abstract

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The abstraction of schematic representations from photographs of real-world scenes

Hock

Schmelzkopf

1980

Memory & Cognition

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Scenic pictures have been a favorite stimulus for a variety of different information-processing paradigms, for example: tachistoscopic perception (Inntraub, 1979;Palmer, 1975), visual search (Biederman, Glass, & Stacy, 1973;Potter, 1975), eye movements (Friedman, 1979;G. Loftus, 1972), priming (Bruner, 1957;McKoon, 1981), long-term recognition (Nickerson, 1968), long-term recall (Goodman, 1980), long-term reconstruction (Mandler & Parker, 1976), cross-modal retention (E. Loftus & Palmer, 1974), sentence verification (Slobin, 1966), and categorization (Tversky & Hemenway, 1983). Yet, little is known about how these stimuli are comprehended when they compose a narrative sequence.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Surface information loss in comprehension

Gernsbacher

1985

Cognitive Psychology

228

185

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Shortly after a sentence has been comprehended, information about its exact surface form (e.g., its word order) becomes less available. The present research demonstrated this phenomenon during the comprehension of nonverbal stimuli (picture stories). In Experiment 1, significantly more surface (left/right orientation) information was lost after comprehending several picture stories than just one; in Experiment 2, more was lost after comprehending an entire picture story than half of one. In Experiment 3, subjects segmented the picture stories into their constituents; in Experiment 4, significantly more surface information was lost after crossing these constituents' boundaries than before. The present research also investigated why surface information is lost. Four explanations were considered: Surface information loss is the result of performing grammatical transformations (the linguistic hypothesis), exceeding short-term memory limitations (the memory limitations hypothesis), integrating information into gist (the integration hypothesis), shifting from building one substructure to initiating another (the processing shift hypothesis). The linguistic and memory limitations hypotheses were considered inadequate; the integration and the processing shift hypotheses were tested in the last set of experiments. In Experiment 5 (using nonverbal stimuli), the predictions made by the processing shift hypothesis were confirmed; in Experiment 6 (using verbal stimuli), these results were replicated. Other implications of the processing shift hypothesis concerning surface information loss are discussed.A well-known phenomenon involved in language comprehension is this: Shortly after a passage is comprehended, information about the exact surface form of its sentences (e.g., their word order) becomes less available. By far the most cited demonstration of this phenomenon is Sachs ' (1967). Her subjects listened to a narrative story that included a sentence such as 1. He sent a letter about it to Galileo, the great Italian scientist.After comprehending this sentence, subjects decided whether it or Sentence 2 was the sentence they just heard. 2A letter about it was sent to Galileo, the great Italian scientist.If subjects were tested immediately after hearing the target sentence, their ability to discriminate between it and its reversed form was around 90%. However, if they were tested after comprehending only 80 additional syllables, performance fell to just above chance.Requests for reprints should be sent to Dr. M. A. Gernsbacher,

show abstract

“…The gradual transformation hypothesis differs from reperception, however, in that the transformation is supposed to be gradual and continuous. Although the gradual transformation hypothesis leads to less specific quantitative predictions than does the reperceptual hypothesis, there is empirical support for the hypothesis in that features of remembered pictures appear to be forgotten at different rates (e.g., Bartlett, 1932;Mandler & Parker, 1976;Mandler & Ritchey, 1977).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Memorial psychophysics for visual area: The effect of retention interval

Kemp

1988

Memory & Cognition

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Previous studies (e.g., Kerst & Howard, 1978) have shown that remembered visual areas are related to actual areas by a more compressive power function than are perceived visual areas. Experiment 1 useda between-groups design to replicate this effect for a map of Europe and showed that compression increased as the retention interval, the time between map inspection and area estimation, increased from 2 min to 1 week. Experiment 2 obtained similar results with a similar design, except that a simple two-region map was used to reduce uncertainty. Overall, the results suggest that two processes may be operating: uncertainty and gradual transformation of the representation of the map in memory.

show abstract

Memory for descriptive and spatial information in complex pictures.

Cited by 129 publications

References 11 publications

The abstraction of schematic representations from photographs of real-world scenes

The abstraction of schematic representations from photographs of real-world scenes

Surface information loss in comprehension

Memorial psychophysics for visual area: The effect of retention interval

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About