BEYOND THE EDGES OF A PICTURE

Viewers remember having seen a greater expanse of a scene than was sho wn in a photograph: an error called boundary extension. Two experiment s examined the cause of the distortion by presenting 303 undergraduate s with close-up, prototypic, wide-angle, or inverted-close-up views of seven scenes. Stimulus durations of 4 or 15 s were tested. Results sh owed that boundary estension decreased with increasingly wide-angle vi ews and that inverted pictures yield ed as great a distortion as did p ictures with a normal orientation. Results support the hypothesis that boundary extension is mediated by the activation of a perceptual sche ma during picture perception and does not simply reflect a tendency fo r subjects to remember having seen a prototypic view.