ABSTRACT

It is well known that humans demonstrate massive and surprisingly rich recognition memory for objects and/or scenes and that context typically aids retrieval of episodic memories. However, when we combine picture memory for 100 objects with the context in the form of a background scene, we find that irrelevant contexts lead to substantial impairments of object memory. Twelve experiments used a standard long-term, picture memory paradigm. Backgrounds could be semantically consistent or inconsistent scenes or simple arrays of objects. In all cases, the target object to be remembered was clearly marked by an outline box. Backgrounds were always known to be irrelevant, but, nevertheless, significantly reduced old/new discrimination for target objects. Interference from the scene was apparently unavoidable, suggesting that the seemingly effortless encoding that makes it easy to store scenes into memory, makes it hard to avoid interference with the encoding and recognition of objects placed in or on those scenes.

摘要

众所周知，人类对物体和/或场景表现出大量且令人惊讶的丰富识别记忆，并且该上下文通常有助于情景记忆的检索。然而，当我们将 100 个对象的图片记忆与背景场景形式的上下文相结合时，我们发现不相关的上下文会导致对象记忆的实质性损害。十二个实验使用标准的长期图片记忆范式。背景可以是语义一致或不一致的场景或简单的对象数组。在所有情况下，要记住的目标对象都由轮廓框清楚地标记。背景总是被认为是不相关的，但是，尽管如此，它显着减少了对目标对象的新旧歧视。来自现场的干扰显然是不可避免的，