DDoC #05: Visual memory: What do you know about what you saw?

A random read on "Gist of a Scene" this time, by Dr. Jeremy M. Wolfe.

When it comes to remembering a scene, humans do not go through all the details of the scene. What matters is only the gist of the scene. However, what constitutes the scene gist is not agreed upon yet. Some of the finding on that research direction are as follows:

1. Change in appearance does not cause a scene gist, (e.g., people remember a scene of a two women talking irrespective of the color of the cloths they wear. This is called “change blindness”
2. Scene gist is not just a collection of objects, relationships between the objects in the scene also matter (e.g., milk being poured from a carton into a glass is not the same as a picture of milk being poured from a carton into the space next to a glass)
3. Scene gist involves some information about the spatial layout of the scene
4. Scene gist also involves the presence of unidentified objects (people do not see all the objects, but they know that certain objects should be there even if it is not visible)

You can find more information in his article.