Kyle-Davidson, Cameron, Solis, Oscar, Robinson, Stephen et al. (2 more authors) (2025) Scene complexity and the detail trace of human long-term visual memory. Vision Research. 108525. ISSN 0042-6989
Abstract
Humans can remember a vast amount of scene images; an ability often attributed to encoding only low-fidelity gist traces of a scene. Instead, studies show a surprising amount of detail is retained for each scene image allowing them to be distinguished from highly similar in-category distractors. The gist trace for images can be relatively easily captured through both computational and behavioural techniques, but capturing detail is much harder. While detail can be broadly estimated at the categorical level (e.g. man-made scenes more complex than natural), there is a lack of both ground-truth detail data at the sample level and a way to operationalise it for measurement purposes. Here through three different studies, we investigate whether the perceptual complexity of scenes can serve as a suitable analogue for the detail present in a scene, and hence whether we can use complexity to determine the relationship between scene detail and visual long term memory for scenes. First we examine this relationship directly using the VISCHEMA datasets, to determine whether the perceived complexity of a scene interacts with memorability, finding a significant positive correlation between complexity and memory, in contrast to the hypothesised U-shaped relation often proposed in the literature. In the second study we model complexity via artificial means, and find that even predicted measures of complexity still correlate with the overall ground-truth memorability of a scene, indicating that complexity and memorability cannot be easily disentangled. Finally, we investigate how cognitive load impacts the influence of scene complexity on image memorability. Together, findings indicate complexity and memorability do vary non-linearly, but generally it is limited to the extremes of the image complexity ranges. The effect of complexity on memory closely mirrors previous findings that detail enhances memory, and suggests that complexity is a suitable analogue for detail in visual long-term scene memory.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
---|---|
Authors/Creators: |
|
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2024 The Authors |
Keywords: | Complexity,Long-term visual memory,Neural networks,Scene detail,Scene memory,Scene perception |
Dates: |
|
Institution: | The University of York |
Academic Units: | The University of York > Faculty of Sciences (York) > Psychology (York) |
Depositing User: | Pure (York) |
Date Deposited: | 18 Dec 2024 11:50 |
Last Modified: | 08 Mar 2025 00:11 |
Published Version: | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.visres.2024.108525 |
Status: | Published |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1016/j.visres.2024.108525 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:220966 |
Download
Filename: 1-s2.0-S004269892400169X-main.pdf
Description: Scene complexity and the detail trace of human long-term visual memory
Licence: CC-BY 2.5