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When we look at a picture, we tend to remember it by enriching the constructed mental representation with elements not present but probable outside the current view. The tendency to remember the perceived view with a broader scope is known as boundary extension (BE). Does BE benefit from paying reduced attention to the picture? While attention plays a central role in memory, only a few studies to date have investigated this question in the field of BE. In this research, participants completed a BE task in single- and dual-task conditions. The results indicate that BE is eliminated when the attention is divided on the onset of scene construction. We therefore discuss the role of attention in BE.

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This study examined the possibility that moderators of false memories in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm affect the occurrence of false memories in the misinformation paradigm. More precisely, the purpose was to determine to what extent an imaging instruction modulates false memories in the DRM and misinformation paradigms. A sample of young adults was assigned to the DRM or the misinformation tasks, either in control conditions or in conditions including an imaging instruction. Findings revealed that an imaging instruction decreases false memories in DRM whereas there is no evidence about imaging effects in the misinformation task. These observations tally with previous studies, reporting a weak or no correlation between false memories in these paradigms, and are discussed in the light of current theories.

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Boundary extension (BE) refers to the tendency to remember a previously perceived scene with a greater spatial expanse. This phenomenon is described as resulting from different sources of information: external (i.e., visual) and internally driven (i.e., amodal, conceptual, and contextual) information. Although the literature has emphasized the role of top-down expectations to account for layout extrapolation, their effect has rarely been tested experimentally. In this research, we attempted to determine how visual context affects BE, as a function of scene exposure duration (long, short). To induce knowledge about visual context, the memorization phase of the camera distance paradigm was preceded by a preexposure phase, during which each of the to-be-memorized scenes was presented in a larger spatial framework. In an initial experiment, we examined the effect of contextual knowledge with presentation duration, allowing for in-depth processing of visual information during encoding (i.e., 15 s). The results indicated that participants exposed to the preexposure showed decreased BE, and displayed no directional memory error in some conditions. Because the effect of context is known to occur at an early stage of scene perception, in a second experiment we sought to determine whether the effect of a preview occurs during the first fixation on a visual scene. The results indicated that BE seems not to be modulated by this factor at very brief presentation durations. These results are discussed in light of current visual scene representation theories.

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In a constantly changing environment, one of the conditions for adaptation is based on the visual system's ability to realize predictions. In this context, a question that arises is the evolution of the processes allowing anticipation with regard to the acquisition of knowledge relative to specific situations. We sought to study this question by focusing on boundary extension, the tendency to overestimate the scope of a previously perceived scene. We presented to novice, beginner, and expert car drivers road scenes in the form of approach sequences constituting very briefly displayed photographs (i.e., 250 milliseconds each), in order to determine the effect of expertise at an early stage of scene perception. After three presentations, participants had to judge whether a fourth photograph was the same, closer up, or further away than the third one. When experts and beginners showed a classical boundary extension effect, novices presented no directional memory distortion. Different hypotheses are discussed.

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When they have to memorize a picture, people usually build a memory trace including more extensive boundaries than the original picture, a phenomenon known as boundary extension or BE. This article looks at whether the emotion category expressed (i.e., happiness, pleasure, irritation, or anger) by actors in short films could have an influence on the BE effect. The results showed that positively valenced emotions (happiness, pleasure) led to an extension effect, while the negatively valenced ones (anger, irritation) did not produce any significant memory distortion. The arousal dimension of emotions had no significant effect on BE. The current results were discussed in the light of previous studies on the links between BE and emotions.

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