The study of visual memory is typically concerned with an image’s content: How well, and with what precision, we can recall which objects, people, or features we have seen in the past. But images also vary in their quality: The same object or scene may appear in an image that is sharp and highly resolved, or it may appear in an image that is blurry and faded. How do we remember those properties? Here six experiments demonstrate a new phenomenon of “vividness extension”: a tendency to (mis)remember images as though they are “enhanced” versions of themselves — that is, sharper and higher quality than they actually appeared at the time of encoding. Subjects briefly saw images of scenes that varied in how blurry they were, and then adjusted a new image to be as blurry as the original. Unlike an old photograph that fades and blurs, subjects misremembered scenes as more vivid (i.e., less blurry) than those scenes had actually appeared moments earlier. Follow-up experiments extended this phenomenon to saturation and pixelation – with subjects recalling scenes as more colorful and resolved – and ruled out various forms of response bias. We suggest that memory misrepresents the quality of what we have seen, such that the world is remembered as more vivid than it is.

视觉记忆的研究通常与图像的内容有关：我们可以回忆到过去看到过的物体，人物或特征的程度和精确度。但是图像的质量也各不相同：相同的对象或场景可能出现在清晰锐利的图像中，或者可能出现在模糊不清的图像中。我们如何记住这些属性？这里有六个实验证明了一种新的“生动度扩展”现象：倾向于（错误）记住图像，就好像它们是其自身的“增强”版本一样，即比编码时实际出现的图像更清晰，质量更高。受试者短暂地看到了场景的图像，这些图像的模糊程度各不相同，然后将新图像调整为与原始图像一样的模糊。与一张褪色和模糊的旧照片不同，被摄对象错误记住的场景比实际出现的场景更生动（即，模糊程度更低）。后续实验将这种现象扩展到饱和和像素化（对象使场景回想起来更加鲜艳和清晰），并排除了各种形式的响应偏差。我们建议记忆会歪曲我们所见事物的质量，从而使人们对世界的记忆比过去更加生动。