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. 2017 Oct 4:8:1712.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01712. eCollection 2017.

The Effect of Consistency on Short-Term Memory for Scenes

Mingliang Gong  1   2 , Yuming Xuan  1   3 , Xinwen Xu  1   3 , Xiaolan Fu  1   3
Affiliations

The Effect of Consistency on Short-Term Memory for Scenes

Mingliang Gong et al. Front Psychol. .

Abstract

Which is more detectable, the change of a consistent or an inconsistent object in a scene? This question has been debated for decades. We noted that the change of objects in scenes might simultaneously be accompanied with gist changes. In the present study we aimed to examine how the alteration of gist, as well as the consistency of the changed objects, modulated change detection. In Experiment 1, we manipulated the semantic content by either keeping or changing the consistency of the scene. Results showed that the changes of consistent and inconsistent scenes were equally detected. More importantly, the changes were more accurately detected when scene consistency changed than when the consistency remained unchanged, regardless of the consistency of the memory scenes. A phase-scrambled version of stimuli was adopted in Experiment 2 to decouple the possible confounding effect of low-level factors. The results of Experiment 2 demonstrated that the effect found in Experiment 1 was indeed due to the change of high-level semantic consistency rather than the change of low-level physical features. Together, the study suggests that the change of consistency plays an important role in scene short-term memory, which might be attributed to the sensitivity to the change of semantic content.

Keywords: change detection; scene consistency; scene gist; semantic content; short-term memory.

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Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
Trial events of Experiment 1. Image courtesy of Davenport and Potter (2004).
FIGURE 2
FIGURE 2
Results of Experiments 1. The columns show detection rates (DR) for (A) background, and (B) foreground object. Error bars denote standard error of the mean (SEM).
FIGURE 3
FIGURE 3
Detection rate as a function of the change of consistency and changing part. Error bars denote standard error of the mean (SEM).
FIGURE 4
FIGURE 4
Examples of intact images used in Experiment 1 (the two images on the left: a football player in a football field and a car on a river) and their phase-scrambled version used in Experiment 2 (the two images on the right). Image courtesy of Davenport and Potter (2004).
FIGURE 5
FIGURE 5
Results of Experiment 2. Error bars denote standard error of the mean (SEM).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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