Recall of scenes encoded from opposing viewpoints.

Abstract

The present research examined the effect, on recall of a scene, of the distribution of viewpoints during the encoding of the scene. Participants completed a visual search task in a 3-D model of a room during which they were given the opportunity to view the room from viewpoints at opposing sides of the room. Subsequently, participants were tasked to recall the locations of the objects in the room. Participants who distributed their views of the room unequally across available viewpoints remembered the objects in the room as being too close to their preferred side of the room. Participants who distributed their views of the room equally across available viewpoints remembered the objects in each half of the room as being too close to the corresponding side of the room. Mindful of previous research that has shown exocentric distances to be underestimated along the depth dimension (Loomis, DaSilva, Fujita, & Fukusima, 1992;Wu, He, & Ooi, 2008), we suggest that the present results reflect underestimation of the distance between the objects and the sides of the room. We suggest that participants used an accumulator-like process to integrate the inconsistent location information that they acquired consequent to their underestimation of distances from opposing viewpoints (Heathcote & Love, 2012).