Abstract
How do people use the structure of items when storing them in visual memory? An iterated learning experiment reveals that people expect visual scenes to be hierarchically organized into self-similar groups, and that this expectation biases visual memory. A series of subsequent experiments on the error structure of recall reveals that the inferred hierarchical structure not only biases what people remember, but also influences how people forget: memory errors can be attributed to different nodes in the hierarchical parse by virtue of the relationships between errors for different objects. Together, these results show not how people use environmental structure to remember displays, but also that the inferred scene hierarchy influences the encoded data structure in memory.