Ishibashi, A. 1 , Ikeda, T. 2 & Osaka, N. 1
1 Department of Psychology, Graduate School of Letters, Kyoto University, Japan
2 Departments of Mind and Brain Science, Graduate School of Human Science, Osaka University, Japan
Natural scenes are reported to be processed rapidly and automatically. We investigated how and what kind of information of scene contexts affects memory of target objects presented in them. We conducted a delayed match sampling test presenting meaningful or scrambled scenes in the background and measured performances of object recognition when background context was unchanged, changed or absent in the recognition phase. The results showed; (1) response time was longer with different background compared to same or no background context; (2) Tendency to give “old” responses was higher with the same background than in other conditions. Both effects were observed only when meaningful backgrounds were utilized. These results indicate that the effect of background context associated with the targets is not always facilitative as the classical encoding specificity principle would predict, but can be considered as distractive when different context is presented. Also indicated was that the meaning of unchanged background context biases the judgments to be more gravitated to correctly and falsely recognizing target objects. It is arguable from these results that non-target semantic information of the scene contexts is memorized automatically and disturbs the retrieval of target objects.