Abstract
Understanding the content of memory is essential to teasing apart its underlying mechanisms. While recognition tests have commonly been used to probe memory, it is difficult to establish what specific content is driving performance. Here, we instead focus on free recall of real-world scenes, and quantify the content of memory using a drawing task. Participants studied 30 scenes and, after a distractor task, drew as many images in as much detail as possible from memory. The resulting memory-based drawings were scored by thousands of online observers, revealing numerous objects, few memory intrusions, and precise spatial information. Further, we find that visual saliency and meaning maps can explain aspects of memory performance and observe no relationship between recall and recognition for individual images. Our findings show that not only is it possible to quantify the content of memory during free recall, but those memories contain detailed representations of our visual experiences.
Highlights
Understanding the content of memory is essential to teasing apart its underlying mechanisms
When we recall a previously experienced event, what exactly are we remembering? Are our memories a precise, high-definition recording of that event, a lowresolution gist of that memory, or even just a verbal description of what we saw? Answering this question is an essential component of being able to tease apart the mechanisms of memory: what information is encoded and maintained, how memory decays over time, and what information is retrieved from these memories
Prior work on free recall of complex stimuli has often employed verbal metrics, having participants encapsulate a visual memory into a single word[7,9,11,12] or brief verbal description[13,14,15], but these measures provide limited insight into the content within those memories
Summary
Understanding the content of memory is essential to teasing apart its underlying mechanisms. Prior work on free recall of complex stimuli has often employed verbal metrics, having participants encapsulate a visual memory into a single word[7,9,11,12] or brief verbal description[13,14,15], but these measures provide limited insight into the content within those memories. Such verbal task-based studies suggest that recall suffers from low capacity, with participants recalling on average fewer than nine items regardless of the number studied[16]. The detail uncovered from recall memory may be very different from what has been explored until now using recognition tasks
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