Abstract
There has been a debate as to whether information that complies with our prior knowledge is better remembered than incongruent information. We aimed to investigate whether schema violations disturb or enhance memory for objects embedded in real-world scenes. We considered recognition performance as well as metacognitive judgements, i.e. the ability to judge the quality of memory decisions. A total of 272 participants took part in our study, which was implemented on the online platform Testable. In a learning phase, participants were presented 60 real-world scenes taken from the SCEGRAM database, containing target objects that were either semantically congruent or incongruent with the scene context (a mug in the kitchen versus in a bathroom). After a delay period of about 20 minutes, participants were asked to indicate for each of the 60 target and additional 60 new distractor objects whether it had been presented during the learning phase. Subsequently, a confidence rating about their decision was obtained. Based on signal detection theory, we assessed recognition performance for schema-congruent and schema-incongruent objects, respectively, by deriving d’ as a sensitivity index and the criterion, i.e. the response bias. Metacognitive sensitivity was evaluated using meta-d’. Our data showed that object memory was significantly better for schema-incongruent targets than for schema-congruent targets. We observed overall conservative response biases, however, decisions were less biased for schema-incongruent targets. Thus, our results indicated that schema violations boost memory performance. Furthermore, analysis of meta-d’ indicated higher metacognitive sensitivity for judging the quality of memory decisions on schema-incongruent targets. We suggest that schema violations in real-world scenes enhance processing of incongruent information and thus augment encoding as well as metacognition during retrieval. In conclusion, our findings support that violationsof prior knowledge do not necessarily interfere with object memory, but benefit memory for real-world scenes.