Evidence for the abstractive encoding of superficial position information in visual patterns

When presented a series of patterns inside a frame, subjects unintentionally retained information concerning the frame-relative location of the elements composing the patterns; they could use this superficial information to estimate the frequency with which the elements occurred at various locations within the frame. There were two aspects of the results that supported the hypothesis that this superficial element-location information was abstractively encoded and, therefore, retrievable independent of the patterns comprising the elements: (1) Correlations between actual and estimated frequency remained significant after the effects of pattern recall were partialled out, and (2) correlations were enhanced by assuming that the frequency estimate for each location was affected by the imprecise coding of position for elements falling in surrounding locations. Additional experiments indicated that an orienting task emphasizing pattern recall resulted in very inaccurate estimation of element-location frequency, and intentional instructions improved the precision of position coding for individual elements.