Peer-Reviewed Articles

Surprise! Draw the scene: Visual recall reveals poor incidental working memory following visual search in natural scenes: access here
Searching within natural scenes can induce incidental encoding of information about the scene and the target, particularly when the scene is complex or repeated. However, recent evidence from attribute amnesia (AA) suggests that in some situations, searchers can find a target without building a robust incidental memory of its task relevant features. Through drawing-based visual recall and an AA search task, we investigated whether search in natural scenes necessitates memory encoding. Our findings suggest that even for searches done in natural scenes, it is possible to locate a target without creating a robust memory of either it or the scene it was in, even if attended to just a few seconds prior.

Cárdenas-Miller, N., O’Donnell, R.E., Tam, J. et al. Surprise! Draw the scene: Visual recall reveals poor incidental working memory following visual search in natural scenes. Memory and Cognition. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-023-01465-9 (2023)