Visual short-term memory, culture, and image structure

Cultural differences in cognition, including visual perception and long-term memory, are influenced by the spatial scale of visual stimuli. The impact of culture varies depending on whether the stimuli are presented at large or small spatial scale. We tested North American and East Asian young adults to determine whether such cultural differences extend to short-term memory. Test materials were images of natural and constructed scenes whose spatial structure could be altered by low-pass filtering. Several seconds after briefly viewing a target scene, a subject saw three versions of that scene: the target itself and two variants whose low-pass filtering differed from the target. From these three, the subject selected the image identical to the target. The two groups did not differ in overall recognition accuracy but did in the way they mistook non-matching images for certain targets. Specifically, North American subjects made significantly fewer errors in matching images whose high-frequency content was intact, providing evidence that cultural differences in prioritization of high spatial frequency information extend to short-term memory. Across both groups, subjects were highly accurate at recognizing images that retained all or most of their high-spatial frequency content and were highly sensitive to different levels of spatial filtering. These findings show that visual memory has sufficient fidelity to support fine discrimination of variation in spatial frequency.