Abstract
Pictures acquired through successive views are remembered briefly, but most are forgotten within a few seconds, suggesting that the scene detail is removed from the memory representation according to the time dependent function. However, previous researchers mimicked this situation by using the stimulus set of the pictures, which were in no context to each other. Thus, it remained unclear whether or not the scene context was critical for the memory decay. The present study examined whether context between scenes affects the memory decay by presenting the multiple different parts of a single picture in a rapid sequence. Furthermore, we assessed the recognition performance from two independent measure (i.e., sensitivity and criterion) by using signal detection theory. The results indicated that the lack of context between visual scenes affects the overall sensitivity but does not affect the time dependent function of the sensitivity. Furthermore, it affects the time dependent function of the criterion for judgment whether the scene was glimpsed previously or not. This suggested that the context between scenes do not affect the memory decay in the recognition sequence but affects the memory retrieval at decision-level stage in recall processing.
