Humans use regularities in the environment to facilitate learning, often without awareness or intent. How might such regularities distort long-term memory? Here, participants studied and reported the colors of objects in a long-term memory paradigm, uninformed that certain colors were sampled more frequently overall. When participants misreported an object’s color, these errors were often centered around the average studied color (i.e., “Rich” color), demonstrating swap errors in long-term memory due to imposed statistical regularities. We observed such swap errors regardless of memory load, explicit knowledge, or the distance in color space between the correct color of the tested object and the Rich color. An explicit guessing strategy where participants intentionally made swap errors when uncertain could not fully account for our results. We discuss other potential sources of observed swap errors such as false memory and implicit biased guessing. Although less robust than swap errors, evidence was also observed for subtle shift errors towards or away from the Rich color dependent on the color distance between the correct color and the Rich color. Together, these findings of swap and shift errors provide converging evidence for memory distortion mechanisms induced by a reference point, bridging a gap in the literature between how attention to regularities similarly influences visual working memory and visual long-term memory.

人类使用环境中的规律性来促进学习，通常没有意识或意图。这种规律性如何扭曲长期记忆？在这里，参与者研究并报告了长期记忆范式中物体的颜色，但不知道某些颜色的采样频率更高。当参与者误报物体的颜色时，这些错误通常集中在平均研究颜色（即“丰富”颜色）周围，这表明由于强加的统计规律导致长期记忆中的交换错误。无论内存负载、显式知识或测试对象的正确颜色与丰富颜色之间的颜色空间距离如何，我们都观察到此类交换错误。参与者在不确定时故意做出交换错误的明确猜测策略不能完全解释我们的结果。我们讨论了观察到的交换错误的其他潜在来源，例如错误记忆和隐含的偏见猜测。虽然不如交换错误稳健，但也观察到了根据正确颜色和丰富颜色之间的颜色距离，朝向或远离丰富颜色的细微偏移误差的证据。总之，这些交换和移位错误的发现为参考点引起的记忆失真机制提供了汇聚证据，弥合了文献中对规律性的注意如何同样影响视觉工作记忆和视觉长期记忆之间的差距。根据正确颜色和丰富颜色之间的颜色距离，还观察到朝向或远离丰富颜色的细微偏移误差的证据。总之，这些交换和移位错误的发现为参考点引起的记忆失真机制提供了汇聚证据，弥合了文献中对规律性的注意如何同样影响视觉工作记忆和视觉长期记忆之间的差距。根据正确颜色和丰富颜色之间的颜色距离，还观察到朝向或远离丰富颜色的细微偏移误差的证据。总之，这些交换和移位错误的发现为参考点引起的记忆失真机制提供了汇聚证据，弥合了文献中对规律性的注意如何同样影响视觉工作记忆和视觉长期记忆之间的差距。