Dramatic changes to well-known places go unnoticed
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How well do we know our city? It turns out, much more poorly than we might imagine. We used declarative memory and eye-tracking techniques to examine people’s ability to detect modifications of landmarks in Toronto locales with which they have had extensive experience. Participants were poor at identifying which scenes contained altered landmarks, whether the modification was to the landmarks’ relative size, internal features, or surrounding context. To determine whether an indirect measure would prove more sensitive, we tracked eye movements during viewing. Changes in overall visual exploration, but not to specific regions of change, were related to participants’ explicit endorsement of scenes as modified. These results support the contention that very familiar landmarks are strongly integrated within the spatial context in which they were first experienced, so that any changes that are consciously detected are at a global or coarse, but not local or fine-grained, level.
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Geometric resemblance might explain findings that people are less likely to detect changes in surface properties than geometric properties of highly familiar and extensively experienced landmarks and scenes; if such changes are detected, they are at a global or coarse level.
“Geometric resemblance might explain findings that people are less likely to detect changes in surface properties than geometric properties of highly familiar and extensively experienced landmarks and scenes, whether tested directly by recognition or indirectly by eye-movements; if such changes are detected, the changes are at a global or coarse level 112 .”
From From cognitive maps to spatial schemas (2023) · cites this paper as [112]
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From cognitive maps to spatial schemas
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- Authors
- Rosenbaum, R. S., Halilova, J. G., Agnihotri, S., D'Angelo, M. C., Winocur, G., Ryan, J. D., & Moscovitch, M.
- Affiliations
- York University (CA)
- Baycrest Hospital (CA)
- University of Toronto (CA)
- Corresponding author
- Rosenbaum, R. Shayna
- Venue
- Neuropsychologia
- Publisher
- Center for Open Science
- Published
- 2020-10-30
- Volume
- 196
- Pages
- 108818-108818
- ISSN
- 0028-3932 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W4391768378
- Cited by
- 2
- References
- 53
- Citations by year
- 2025: 1 · 2022: 1
- FWCI
- 0.24
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- cc-by-nc
- Locations
- Neuropsychologia (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Canada First Research Excellence Fund
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (rgpin-2018-06399, RGPIN‐04238‐2015)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Memory Processes and Influences
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Automotive Engineering › Spatial Cognition and Navigation
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Memory and Neural Mechanisms
- Keywords
- scene memory, gist memory, local memory, visual exploration, eye movements, declarative memory, spatial memory, hippocampal-neocortical interaction, remote memory, urban landmarks
- MeSH terms
- Eye Movements, Hippocampus, Humans
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