Abstract
Humans can easily form memories of naturalistic scenes with rich visual details and recreate them in drawings, but how robust are incidental memories of scenes when participants only expect to search for an object within them? Tests of incidental working memory for simple search stimuli (e.g., letters, colored shapes) show that even an attended target’s identity cannot be accurately retrieved when participants only expect to report its location, a phenomenon termed attribute amnesia. We predict that this form of expectation-based memory selectivity will also be present for both the whole scene and the search target when participants are asked to search for an object in a scene and only report its location. In our experiments, participants located wall art or pillows within novel indoor scenes for 43 trials before being unexpectedly prompted to draw the entire scene (Experiment 1) or the wall art which was just the search target (Experiment 2). Naïve raters matched participants’ drawings to the actual scene or object. In both experiments, the failure to draw accurately on the surprise trial was dramatic. Most drawings lacked visual details to be sufficiently recognizable, were not in the same basic category as the scene or object, and some drawers even submitted empty canvases. On the next trial, after developing an expectation to draw detailed scenes or objects, the same drawers produced highly recognizable scenes and objects. Experiment 3 further showed that these memory failures were not merely attributable to surprise-related interference. Thus, despite being capable of reconstructing visual details from memory, response-irrelevant details of scenes, or even attended-to objects themselves, may not be encoded to begin with. Rather, participants primarily encode information relevant to current goals and expectations. We theorize that this is a fundamental property of cognitive computations designed to optimize task performance and minimize resource use.