Looking at pictures but remembering scenes

Ss tend to remember close-up photographs as having had extended boundaries (Intraub & Richardson, 1989). Three alternate explanations were tested: object completion, distortion toward a perceptual schema, and normalization toward a prototypic view. In three experiments, 55-130 undergraduates viewed 16 close-up, prototypic, or wide-angle views of objects for 15 s each. Immediately or 48 hr later, they rated test pictures on a 5-point scale as "same, " "closer up, " or "farther away. " Results ruled out object completion because boundary extension occurred when the picture contained no incomplete objects. Immediate tests supported the perceptual schema hypothesis because all unidirectional distortions involved boundary extension. Delayed tests were more suggestive of a memory schema effect because wide-angle pictures yielded boundary restriction. A two-component model of picture processing is proposed. Strictly speaking, a portrait of a friend contains a disem-bodied head and some background information. Yet the viewer does not wince. It is understood that the rest of the friend and the rest of the background "exist " just beyond the picture's boundaries. The viewer apparently perceives the depicted information within this larger context. Picture mem-ory research, however, has usually focused on recognition memory for the specific contents of a picture (e.g., Bartlett