Drawings reveal changes in object memory, but not spatial memory, across time

Time has an immense influence on our memory. Truncated encoding leads to memory for only the ‘gist’ of an image, and long delays before recall result in generalized memories with few details. Here, we used crowdsourced scoring of hundreds of drawings made from memory after variable encoding (Experim...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Cognition 2025-01, Vol.254, p.105988, Article 105988
Main Authors: Megla, Emma, Rosenthal, Samuel R., Bainbridge, Wilma A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescent
Adult
False memory
Female
Humans
Long-term memory
Male
Memory - physiology
Memory recall
Mental Recall - physiology
Pattern Recognition, Visual - physiology
Scene perception
Spatial Memory - physiology
Time Factors
Visual memory
Visual processing
Young Adult
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Summary:Time has an immense influence on our memory. Truncated encoding leads to memory for only the ‘gist’ of an image, and long delays before recall result in generalized memories with few details. Here, we used crowdsourced scoring of hundreds of drawings made from memory after variable encoding (Experiment 1) and retentions of that memory (Experiment 2) to quantify what features of memory content change across time. We found that whereas some features of memory are highly dependent on time, such as the proportion of objects recalled from a scene and false recall for objects not in the original image, spatial memory was highly accurate and relatively independent of time. We also found that we could predict which objects were recalled across time based on the location, meaning, and saliency of the objects. The differential impact of time on object and spatial memory supports a separation of these memory systems.
ISSN:0010-0277
1873-7838
1873-7838
DOI:10.1016/j.cognition.2024.105988