Tall towers: Schemas and illusions when perceiving and remembering a familiar building

Abstract

Summary We investigated how schemas can bias both memory and perception of a frequently seen building leading to a horizontal‐vertical illusion. Specifically, undergraduate students (n = 172) were asked to estimate and sketch the dimensions of a highly familiar campus building to determine if they misremember or misperceive the building's features. Despite its cubic dimensions, participants frequently overestimated the building's height to width ratio, both on sketches and estimates, as they were likely biased by the horizontal‐vertical illusion and the schema that buildings are often taller than wider. This occurred regardless of whether participants sketched and estimated from memory or completed these tasks while perceiving the building. Additionally, participants were often unable to correctly identify the building's outline on a recognition test, even while looking at it. These results demonstrate that both perceptual and memory accuracy can be impacted by schematic biases and cognitive illusions.

Incidental visual memory and metamemory for a famous monument

“…Our sample of participants was relatively large ( N = 119) and included a wide range of both ages (19–78 years) and years lived near to the monument (from only 1 year to up to 66 years), as well as a mixed degree of familiarity with the monument (from 5 to 100). In line with previous related research (Murphy & Castel, 2021 ; Rosielle & Scaggs, 2008 ), the results of the present study show that people are extremely inaccurate at both recalling and recognizing a highly popular ornamental monument located in a crowded area of their place of residence, no matter the perceptual simplicity of it and even though the monument is preserved to be seen and admired. Remarkably, this poor memory performance did not vary as a function of the number of years people had lived near the monument or of the self-reported familiarity with the monument.…”

“…can provide a complementary theoretical approach for studying cognition and have more translational impact” (p. 475). Following this remark, a first step on this line has been recently taken by Murphy and Castel ( 2021 ), who examined the accuracy of visual memory of a familiar building (the psychology building at University of California Los Angeles [UCLA]) for a sample of undergraduate students from that university. Interestingly, most of participants overestimated the building’s height to width ratio biased by the horizontal–vertical illusion, despite of the actual cubic dimensions of the building.…”

“…Emblematical monuments are frequently used as promotional images of cities or countries (e.g., Paris’s Eiffel Tower or the Coliseum of Rome), thus adding an extra virtual contact by seeing them in pictures or videos. Indeed, we can recognize cities by their defining monuments and buildings (the skyline ; Murphy & Castel, 2021 ). Additionally, monuments play an important role in guiding navigational behavior in urban contexts (Chan et al, 2012 ), and even frequently serve as meeting points, especially for crowded areas of the cities.…”

“…Hence, for this reason, we considered that making use of a well-known monument from our environment might be especially suitable in order to study the incidental (or passive) memory of everyday objects. At the same time, it might suppose a relevant way to explore the mechanisms of human memory in ecological environments following the line of research opened by Murphy and Castel ( 2021 ) and Rosielle and Scaggs ( 2008 ). In contrast with previous studies, our everyday setting is not a functional or useful building.…”

“…In other words, the external design of the PA is clearly the target of every exposure to it. Conversely, the university buildings studied in Murphy and Castel ( 2021 ) and Rosielle and Scaggs ( 2008 ) were built with clear functional purposes and their external appearance is a secondary visual feature. For this reason, we cannot directly generalize the results obtained by those studies to the visual memory of ornamental monuments and so new data should be collected to explore this topic.…”