H. Intraub et al., EFFECTS OF PERCEIVING AND IMAGINING SCENES ON MEMORY FOR PICTURES, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition, 24(1), 1998, pp. 186-201
Boundary extension is the tendency to remember having seen a greater e
xpanse of a scene than was shown. Four experiments tested whether a pi
cture must depict a partial view of a scene for the distortion to occu
r. The premise was that partial views activate a perceptual schema, a
representation of the expected scene structure outside the view. Parti
cipants were 473 undergraduates. Experiments 1 and 2 tested recognitio
n memory and recall of 16 outline-objects presented in outline-scenes
versus presentation on blank backgrounds. Experiments 3 and 4 compared
memory for outline-objects when scene context was or was not imagined
. Boundary errors consistent with the perceptual schema hypothesis onl
y occurred for partial views (perceived or imagined). Results suggest
that scene perception and imagination activate the same schematic repr
esentation.