Misremembering Pictured Objects: People of All Ages Demonstrate the Boundary Extension Illusion

Abstract

In the boundary extension illusion, subjects recollect more of a photographed scene than was originally shown. In this study, first- and fifth-grade children, young adult college students, and older adults studied 4 one-object or 4 two-object picture stimuli for 15 s each. Immediately after each visual scene was shown, the subjects drew it from memory inside a rectangle that was the same size as the previous picture. This study demonstrated that all age groups, from young children to older adults, were susceptible to the boundary extension illusion. This finding is discussed in terms of Intraub's perceptual schema hypothesis and Johnson's source-monitoring hypothesis.

Understanding boundary extension: Normalization and extension errors in picture memory among adults and boys with and without Asperger's syndrome

“…Here the task for participants was natural and easily understood even among boys who might have difficulty with some testing situations. The finding of extremely high degrees of boundary extension in these groups supports those of Seamon et al (2002) in demonstrating boundary extension in people of all ages. In Seamon et al's study, younger participants actually showed greater levels of boundary extension than college students.…”

“…It is possible that the greater richness of the original memory helps them discriminate it from the picture presented at test, thus guarding against normalization in memory, though not against the initial perceptual process of extension. EXPERIMENT 2 Seamon et al (2002) used a drawing task to demonstrate reliable boundary extension both in children and elderly participants. In general they found that the degree of extension in these populations was greater than in college students.…”

“…Whilst it enables us to make specific predictions about how those with ASD might perform on a boundary extension task, there are clear difficulties in using drawing as a tool to measure boundary extension in this population since they show an atypical drawing style (i.e., local style). Furthermore, although previous researchers have used drawing tasks to make comparisons between typically developing groups (e.g., Seamon, Schlegel, Hiester, Landau, & Blumenthal, 2002), drawing style is well known to change as a function of age (e.g., Barlow, Jolley, White, & Galbraith, 2003;Jolley, Knox, & Foster, 2000;Thomas & Silk, 1990). We thus developed a testing procedure that was simple to understand for participants of different ages and clinical status and which was designed to yield a readily interpretable measure of boundary extension.…”

Representing, perceiving, and remembering the shape of visual space

“…Since this initial demonstration, much research has been done showing the generality of this effect. For example, boundary extension is robust to various tasks beyond drawing, such as rating and border adjustment (e.g., Intraub et al, 1992Intraub et al, , 2006, and to different image sets (Candel et al, 2003;Daniels and Intraub, 2006); it operates over a range of timescales from minutes to hours (Intraub and Dickinson, 2008); and it is found in both young children and older adults (Candel et al, 2004;Seamon et al, 2002). Interestingly, boundary extension occurs even when observers are blindfoldedthey explore space with their hands -suggesting an important link between the representations of space across sensory modalities (Intraub, 2004).…”

Distortion in Visual Memory for Wide-angle Image

“…심지어는 피실험자들에 게 이러한 왜곡경향이 있음을 미리 알려주고 실험을 진행한 경우에도 경계확장의 정도는 약해졌지만 제거되지 않았다고 한다 (Intraub and Bodamer, 1993). 또한, 기억유지 시간 (retention time)이 1초 정도로 짧은 경우에도 관찰된다고 하며 , 부정적인 감성을 유발하는 사 진이든 아니든 상관없이 (Candel et al, 2003) 다양한 연 령층의 피실험자들에게서 관찰된다고 한다 (Seamon et al, 2002).…”