Recognition memory is better for moving images than for static images (the dynamic superiority effect), and performance is best when the mode of presentation at test matches that at study (the study-test congruence effect). We investigated the basis for these effects. In Experiment 1, dividing attention during encoding reduced overall performance but had little effect on the dynamic superiority or study-test congruence effects. In addition, these effects were not limited to scenes depicting faces. In Experiment 2, movement improved both old-new recognition and scene orientation judgments. In Experiment 3, movement improved the recognition of studied scenes but also increased the spurious recognition of novel scenes depicting the same people as studied scenes, suggesting that movement improves the identification of individual objects or actors without necessarily improving the retrieval of associated information. We discuss the theoretical implications of these results and highlight directions for future investigation.
Memory for moving scenes 2
Exploring the memory advantage for moving scenesThe visual world is intrinsically dynamic and our visual and mnemonic systems have developed to encode and retrieve information about a moving environment (Gibson, 1979). In recent years there has been a surge of interest in the effects of movement on memory for faces (Knight & Johnston, 1997;Lander & Bruce, 2003;Lander & Chuang, 2005;O'Toole, Roark, & Abdi, 2002;Pike, Kemp, Towell, & Phillips, 1997) and objects (Balas & Sinha, 2009;Koban & Cook, 2009;Stone, 1998Stone, , 1999Vuong & Tarr, 2004). These studies have shown that dynamic information can be stored in long-term memory; people encode the temporal sequence of views of a moving stimulusits "spatiotemporal signature" -so that the information extracted from dynamic stimuli is more than just a set of static views, particularly when the motion is non-rigid (Knight & Johnston, 1997;Lander & Chuang, 2005;Stone, 1999).To date, there has been surprisingly little research on memory for moving scenes -natural images depicting complex agglomerations of objects and people. In an early study, Goldstein, Chance, Hoisington, and Buescher (1982) had participants study film clips or still images taken from those clips, and administered a recognition memory test a few minutes later. They reported a dynamic superiority effect: Recognition was better for moving images than for static images, although Goldstein et al.'s comparison was not well controlled as the durations of moving and static stimuli were not equal. More recently, Matthews, Benjamin, and Osborne (2007) presented participants with moving and static scenes of equal duration drawn from a wide variety of sources, and tested recognition memory at intervals ranging from 3 days to 1 month. Recognition of moving scenes was better than that of static scenes, and this moving advantage was independent of chromaticity. Matthews et al. also examined performance in a "multistatic" condition in which single frames drawn from regu...