Finite Boundary Extension of Event Scene Memory: An Example of a Flight Scene

Abstract: Visual scene perception and memory are important process for human adaptation to the environment, but the memory of the scene may produce errors. The memory errors at the scene boundaries are called boundary transformation, which is represented by boundary extension and boundary contraction. Boundary extension refers to the memory of a visual scene containing information beyond the actual boundary. Previous studies have focused on daily life scenes. Therefore, in this study, we focus on flight scenes, which have more complex factors than daily life scenes, such as huge objects, changes in three-dimensional spatial perspective, unnatural depth of field, and scene tilt. These complex factors may lead to perceptual distortions of the flight scene. There are differences in scene gist between non-accident scenes based on salient physical feature distribution and accident scenes based on negative events; these differences make them have different emotional valence and arousal. This study explores the boundary transformation properties of the two types of flight scene memories.
The boundary transformation of non-accident and accident flight scenes was compared using the paradigm of rapid serial visual presentation, and the effects of scene object distribution, scene viewpoint, and scene perceptual distance on the level of boundary transformation were also examined. In Experiment 1, we investigated the effects of the centralized and decentralized distribution of aircraft objects on the level of boundary transformation of different types of flight scenes. In Experiment 2, we tested the boundary transformation characteristics of the two types of flight scene memories from both the horizontal and overlooking viewpoints. In Experiment 3, we examined the boundary transformation characteristics of the two types of flight scene memories by adding positive and negative extremal edges to change the perceived distance of the scenes. The data were collected using rapid serial visual presentation and judgmental confidence ratings.
The findings are as follows. (1) The flight scene memories are more likely to present boundary extension. (2) The boundary extension level of the non-accident flight scenes with decentralized distribution was higher than that of the centralized distribution condition, and the boundary extension level of the non-accident flight scenes with an overlooking viewpoint was higher than that of a horizontal viewpoint. The confidence rating task in Experiment 1 also showed that the decentralized non-accident scenes obtained the highest ratings. (3) The aircraft distribution characteristics and viewpoints did not affect the boundary extension level of the flight accident scenes. (4) Reducing the perceived distance by adding positive extremal edges significantly increased the boundary extension of the non-accident flight scenes, and increasing the perceived distance by adding negative extremal edges significantly reduced the boundary extension of the flight accident scenes.
In conclusion, boundary extension is more likely to occur in scene memory with the airplane as the primary object, which is called the visual saliency effect. The accident scene will activate the emotional attention mode due to its salient emotional scene gist so that its boundary extension is limited. The results illustrated that the normalization characteristics of scene memory and the explanation in the theory of the multisource model of scene perception can be defined according to the complexity of the scene gist.