Relevance-of-processing manipulations on familiarity- and recollection-based recognition for dynamic scenes

Navigating spatial environments is foundational to human behavior, critically involving familiarity and recollection processes. The extent to which these cognitive processes are affected by encoding manipulations is poorly understood, though, as most research examining encoding manipulation effects on recognition has implemented standard word list-learning paradigms. The current study examined how encoding manipulations impacted recognition memory by having participants tour dynamic scenes under different encoding conditions (passively viewing scenes while listening to pre-generated names, self-generating descriptive names to describe the scenes, or judging whether scenes took place in an indoor or outdoor setting), then tour novel test scenes that were either configurally similar or dissimilar to studied scenes. Results indicated that, compared to passive viewing, orienting participants toward perceptual aspects (i.e., requiring indoor/outdoor judgments) boosted familiarity-based discrimination and decreased recollection. Conversely, elaborative, semantic encoding (i.e., self-generating study scene names) increased recollection but not familiarity-based discrimination compared to passive viewing. These results fit with the broader verbal learning literature, suggesting that familiarity is sensitive to perceptual manipulations, whereas recollection is sensitive to elaborative processing, while also demonstrating encoding manipulation effects on scene memory. We propose that the relevance of encoded features is impactful on subsequent memory performance, as orienting participants to perceptual scene properties boosts familiarity, while elaborative task-relevant processing boosts recollection.