One of the more powerful impressions created by vision is that of a coherent, richly-detailed world where everything is present simultaneously. Indeed, this impression is so compelling that we tend to ascribe these properties not only to the external world, but to our internal representations as well. But results from several recent experiments argue against this latter ascription. For example, changes in images of real-world scenes often go unnoticed when made during a saccade, flicker, blink, or movie cut. This "change (...) blindness" provides strong evidence against the idea that our brains contain a picture-like representation of the scene that is everywhere detailed and coherent. (shrink)

The relation between conscious recollection and source memory for perceptual details was investigated in three experiments that combined the remember–know paradigm with a multidimensional source monitoring test. Experiment 1 replicated that source memory for perceptual details is better in the case of “remember” than “know” judgments. Experiment 2 showed that the relation between “remember” judgments and source memory for perceptual details is diminished by a semantic orienting task during encoding. Experiment 3 demonstrated that “remember” judgments are related to enhanced source (...) memory for specific and unique kinds of perceptual source information, whereas memory for incomplete and global perceptual source information does not differentiate between “remember” and “know” judgments. The results show that the attentional focus during encoding and the specificity of retrieved source information form boundary conditions for the use of source memory for perceptual details as a basis of “remember” judgments. (shrink)