The influence of functional components of natural scenes on episodic memory

Prior expectation for the structure of natural scenes is perhaps the most influential contributor to episodic memory for objects in scenes. While the influence of functional components of natural scenes on scene perception and visual search has been well studied, far less is known about the independent contributions of these components to episodic memory. In this investigation, we systematically removed three functional components of natural scenes: global-background, local spatial, and local associative information, to evaluate their impact on episodic memory. Results revealed that [partially] removing the global-background negatively impacted recall accuracy following short encoding times but had relatively little impact on memory after longer times. In contrast, systematically removing local spatial and associative relationships of scene objects negatively impacted recall accuracy following short and longer encoding times. These findings suggest that scene background, object spatial arrangements, and object relationships facilitate not only scene perception and object recognition, but also episodic memory. Interestingly, the impact of these components depends on how much encoding time is available to store information in episodic memory. This work has important implications for understanding how the inherent structure and function of the natural world interacts with memory and cognition in naturalistic contexts.