Thus, the detail uncovered from recall memory may be very different from what has been explored until now using recognition tasks. Recognition and recall show dissociable activation in the brain 33, 34, 35 and can be impaired separately by different lesions 36. However, largely due to the complexity and subjectivity of drawings, such studies have often used small stimulus sets with simple metrics of interest (e.g., 24), or subjective experimenter ratings (e.g., 10, 31, 32), without delving into the rich content within these drawings.Īlthough recognition and recall have both been used to probe memory, they may also not reflect the same underlying mechanisms. The ability to copy line drawings has also been used to diagnose memory disorders 27, 28, 29 and spatial neglect 30, and scene drawings have been used to look at effectiveness of encoding strategies 31 and the extension of boundaries in memory 10, 32. Drawings have been used to understand mental schemas of familiar objects 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 and cognitive differences between artists and non-artists 22, 23, 24, and computational models are being developed to aid with drawing recognition and production 25, 26. An alternative approach is to use drawing, which can be considered a visual recall task. Such verbal task-based studies suggest that recall suffers from low capacity, with participants recalling on average fewer than nine items regardless of the number studied 16.
#Us memory pictures on state free#
Prior work on free recall of complex stimuli has often employed verbal metrics, having participants encapsulate a visual memory into a single word 7, 9, 11, 12 or brief verbal description 13, 14, 15, but these measures provide limited insight into the content within those memories. However, for complex stimuli such as real-world scenes, free recall is challenging to measure. Such studies have generally used simple stimuli including single words 7, 8, images with few, isolated objects 9, 10, or line drawings 11, 12, 13. It is also unclear what specific content (e.g., the whole image, specific objects, or idiosyncratic features) drives successful recognition of an image.Īlternatively, memory can be tested using free recall in the absence of any explicit cues or foil images. However, this high capacity memory may contain relatively low detail-with observers likely using image gist to determine recognition 4, thus making recognition memory prone to errors such as change blindness 3, 5 and spatial errors 6. Some studies have reported a high capacity in recognition memory for thousands of object images 1, 2, 3. Previous work has often tackled this question from the angle of visual recognition, or the ability to identify a previously seen item as familiar or not. Here, we present a large-scale examination of the information content in visual memories. When we recall a previously experienced event, what exactly are we remembering? Are our memories a precise, high-definition recording of that event, a low-resolution gist of that memory, or even just a verbal description of what we saw? Answering this question is an essential component of being able to tease apart the mechanisms of memory: what information is encoded and maintained, how memory decays over time, and what information is retrieved from these memories.
0 kommentar(er)
