Carmela Gottesman¹ (), Ashley Schirmer¹, Kristen Tehonica¹; ¹University of South Carolina Salkehatchie

When testing scene memory, participants typically simply look at the scene or they may be instructed to study it during the presentation stage. However, most of our interactions with the scene around us in everyday situations involves doing different tasks with objects, like picking up litter, making a sandwich, etc. This study examines how thinking of, and imagining performing tasks affect the spatial mental representation of scenes. Boundary extension refers to the memory error in which people report remembering areas of the scene that were actually beyond the edges of the picture they saw. We examine if imagining doing a task will affect memory for the picture boundaries. Each picture presented in this study, was of a scene containing objects related to two tasks, one more to the left and one more to the right in the picture. Participants were asked to examine the pictures and imagine themselves doing one of the two tasks, counterbalanced across participants. Afterwards, the viewers were shown four versions of each of the scenes. Each version showed segments of the scene with different boundaries: the original image, an image where boundaries are extended in all directions, an image where the boundaries are extended in the direction more relevant to the task they were imagining, and an image where the boundaries are extended in the opposite direction. The viewers were asked to select which version best fits the picture they remember seeing before. Viewers were less likely to choose the version with overall extended boundaries, but they were equally likely to choose all other options. Notably, the choice with boundaries extended on the side of the performed task was not significantly differentiated from the one with extended boundaries on the other side. This suggests that imagining performing a task may reduce but not eliminated boundary extension.