Investigating the Effect of Sensory Experiences on Visual Attention

Abstract

After viewing emotional scenes, people tend to remember central details, such as a weapon, more vividly than peripheral details, such as other witnesses. This phenomenon is an example of boundary restriction. Boundary restriction is a memory error in which the boundaries of a scene are remembered as narrower than they actually were. Contrastingly, boundary extension is the tendency for people to erroneously remember the background of a scene as more expansive than it was. While boundary extension is a highly robust phenomenon, boundary restriction has yielded inconsistent findings within the literature. Previous studies have primarily used negatively valenced images to indirectly manipulate arousal and have found conflicting effects on boundary restriction. The present study aimed to manipulate physiological arousal directly using the cold pressor task. Participants viewed 24 neutral images of everyday objects while completing the cold pressor task or without the cold pressor task. After a 5 minute delay, participants saw the same unchanged 24 images again, but were told that some of the images may have been altered such that they were more zoomed in or out than they were originally. Participants selected the extent to which they believed the images had changed. As we expected, participants in the cold pressor condition made more boundary restriction errors - selecting that the image was farther away than the original - and fewer boundary extension errors than the control participants. Our results suggest that arousal has an important role in boundary judgements and our memory for proximity. Keywords: Memory, Attention, Arousal, Cold pressor task, Scene perception