The effect of spatial and nonspatial contextual information on visual object memory

Recent research has found visual object memory can be stored as part of a larger scene representation rather than independently of scene context. The present study examined how spatial and nonspatial contextual information modulate visual object memory. Two experiments tested participants’ visual memory by using a change detection task in which a target object's orientation was either the same as it appeared during initial viewing or changed. In addition, we examined the effect of spatial and nonspatial contextual manipulations on change detection performance. The results revealed that visual object representations can be maintained reliably after viewing arrays of objects. Moreover, change detection performance was significantly higher when either spatial or nonspatial contextual information remained the same in the test image. We concluded that while processing complex visual stimuli such as object arrays, visual object memory can be stored as part of a comprehensive scene representation, and both spatial and nonspatial contextual changes modulate visual memory retrieval and comparison.