Quantifying Precision and Availability of Location Memory in Everyday Pictures and Some Implications for Picture Database Design.

Abstract

The authors investigated whether memory for object locations in pictures could be exploited to address known difficulties of designing query languages for picture databases. M. W. Lansdale's (1998) model of location memory was adapted to 4 experiments observing memory for everyday pictures. These experiments showed that location memory is quantified by 2 parameters: a probability that memory is available and a measure of its precision. Availability is determined by controlled attentional processes, whereas precision is mostly governed by picture composition beyond the viewer's control. Additionally, participants' confidence judgments were good predictors of availability but were insensitive to precision. This research suggests that databases using location memory are feasible. The implications of these findings for database design and for further research and development are discussed.

Something Overlooked? How experts in change detection use visual saliency

“…Second, this study suggests that visual saliency affords benefits to expert and naive viewers alike in the encoding of location information because it provides readily available, and reliable, anchor points against which location is judged. The implication of this is that for any task in which the encoding of location is relevant or potentially exploitable such as in a pictorial database query language (see Lansdale et al, 2005;Lansdale, Scrivener, & Woodcock, 1996), the overlay of salient anchor points structured to maximise the accuracy Copyright of location coding will improve performance (Lansdale, 1998). On the other hand, as we have observed above, this study also tells us that if the task places no premium upon encoding location information for future recall (as in the airport security example), then the addition of these anchor points may influence the viewers' scanpaths in other ways which may add or detract from other objectives of the task.…”

“…The accuracy of this judgement is quantified in the following way for each stimulus separately; using methods developed by Lansdale, Oliff, & Baguley, (2005). The coordinates of the participant's response were coded as a cell in a 9 Â 9 grid overlaying the stimulus and the displacement of the participant's response from the correct location was then calculated.…”

“…M. Lansdale et al 2 Location memory responses were analysed in terms of their location on a 9 Â 9 grid rather than absolute locations (although these too were recorded) to enable the use of analytic techniques developed by Lansdale (1998), Lansdale, Oliff, and Baguley (2005), and Baguley, Lansdale, Lines, and Parkin (2006; Appendix A) to be applied. These quantify recall of location both in terms of exactly correct recall and also the degree of error.…”

Aging, Eye Movements, and Object-Location Memory

“…Scoring for the relocation task was not as straightforward as that for the recognition task because “location memory is often imprecise, and much recall is seen as near-miss errors” ([39], p. 67). Furthermore, it is important to distinguish the two types of spatial location memory: memory for the location of individual objects in a scene (or object-location memory) and memory for occupied locations in the scene, regardless of correct object identity (or location memory) [5].…”