False memory beyond a view: effects of boundary interpretation
Date
2023
Authors
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Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
People remember seeing more of a real world scene than what they are shown, an error referred to as boundary extension (BE). Scene construction beyond the edges of a boundary causes BE. Would scene construction be curtailed if boundary ownership changed (Nelson & Palmer, 2001)? To create ambiguous boundary ownership, we cut scenes into meaningful shapes (e.g., cloud, hand, clover). We attempted to bias the perception of the boundary to the object through instructions, post-stimulus questions, and a spatial position task. Attention instructions in the Scene Group promoted view boundary ownership, whereas in the Shape Group, they promoted object boundary ownership. Boundary tests revealed that rather than curtailing scene construction, the Shape Group exhibited greater BE than the Scene Group, whether stimulus duration was 3 s (Experiment 1; n = 208), or only 340 ms (Experiment 2; n = 208). Perhaps our task was not strong enough to shift boundary ownership, so we cut scenes into U.S. states and created a more complex task (whether a state was normal or mirror-reversed) with a mental rotation aspect in Experiment 3 (n = 318). The Shape Group performed the normal/reversed task, while the Scene Group performed an indoors/outdoors task that related to scene properties. They were instructed to focus on the state or the scene depending on their group. Boundary tests revealed that BE was elicited in both the Scene and Shape Groups, and there was no difference between the groups. Results demonstrate that scene construction may be insensitive to boundary ownership with a scene present; it may be elicited solely by the presence of scene properties.
Description
Keywords
False memory, Boundary extension, Scene construction, Scene properties