Reply to Intraub

Abstract

Intraub posits the existence of two separate processes in scene memory: one in which we automatically extrapolate the visual information in a scene beyond its boundaries (scene construction), and one in which we normalize our memories to either a schema or an average (normalization). She claims that scene construction will lead to transformations exclusively in the direction of boundary extension (BE), while normalization will produce bidirectional transformations of both BE and the opposite effect of boundary contraction (BC). Thus, because we observed both BE and BC in our study [1], our paradigm must be tapping into additional cognitive processes than just scene construction. However, our paper [1] questions this premise - if BE and BC are equally common using large, representative stimulus sets in the same tasks used previously [2,3], then perhaps prior studies primarily found unidirectional BE effects due to limited stimulus sampling, and there was no privileged link between boundary extension and scene construction in memory to begin with.

Trial registration: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT00001360.