Enhancing Feelings-of-Familiarity for Dynamic Scenes by Manipulating Relevance-of-Processing

Encountering a novel scene can sometimes lead to feelings of familiarity. Prior work suggests thatthis can be driven by previous exposure to a configurally similar scene, despite that scene failingto be explicitly recalled. The extent to which these metamemorial sensations for scenes are affectedby encoding manipulations is poorly understood, as most research examining encodingmanipulation effects on familiarity and recollection has implemented standard word list-learningparadigms. The current study examined how encoding manipulations impacted familiarity andrecollection induced by having participants tour dynamic scenes under different encodingconditions (Passive Viewing, Self-Generation, Indoor/Outdoor Judgment), then tour test scenesthat were either configurally similar to studied scenes or entirely novel. Results indicated that,compared to passively viewing, orienting participants toward perceptual aspects of scenes (i.e.,requiring an indoor/outdoor judgment) boosted familiarity-based discrimination and decreasedrecollection. In contrast, requiring participants to engage in elaborative encoding (i.e., self-generate descriptive study scene names) led to an increase in recollection but did not increasefamiliarity-based discrimination compared to the passive condition. These results fit with thebroader verbal learning literature, which suggests that familiarity is sensitive to perceptualmanipulations, whereas recollection is sensitive to elaborative processing, while alsodemonstrating the effects of encoding manipulations on memory for scenes. We propose that therelevance of the encoded features has a greater impact on subsequent memory performance, asorienting participants to the scene’s perceptual properties boosts familiarity, while focusing onelaborative task-relevant processing of the individual scenes boosts recollection.