Calysta Hawkins-Luken, “The Role of Prior Knowledge on Recalling Scene Images”
Mentor: Caitlin Bowman, Psychology
Poster #79

Memory is a fundamental cognitive function necessary for learning and navigating through the world. We focused on two types of memory in this study: semantic and visual memory. Semantic memory is general world knowledge accrued throughout one’s life, and visual memory is the memory of specific visual features. The aim of this study was to understand how individuals use their past experiences (semantic memory) and encode new memory (visual memory). Participants (n=16) completed a study phase where they saw scene images, half of which were of famous locations (e.g., Big Ben) and half of which were non-famous locations (e.g., Clock of Erbil). Next, they were asked to write descriptions of each of the scene image from memory. They were asked to describe as many details as they could remember about the scenes they saw in the experiment. We then had four raters that would code the written descriptions for the number of accurate visual details among other factors. Preliminary results show that most of what participants remembered for both famous and non-famous scenes were visual details. Only a handful of subjects mentioned semantic knowledge about the scene in their descriptions (e.g., Big Ben is in London). In the future, we are planning to compare older adults with younger adults and see how prior semantic knowledge affects the ability to remember visual details of scenes in difference age groups.