Visual short-term memory, culture, and image structure

TL;DR

This study shows that cultural background influences how people remember visual details, particularly high-frequency spatial information, in short-term memory.

Contribution

The paper is the first to test whether spatial frequency information contributes to cross-cultural differences in short-term memory.

Findings

North Americans made fewer errors when high-frequency content was intact, suggesting a cultural prioritization of such details.

Both groups were highly accurate in recognizing images with high-spatial frequency content and sensitive to spatial filtering levels.

Cultural differences in visual memory fidelity were observed in error patterns, not overall accuracy.

Abstract

Cultural differences in cognition, including visual perception and long-term memory, may arise because typical visual environments differ across cultures, particularly in their spatial scale. Consequently, the influence of culture on cognitive processing depends on whether stimuli are presented at a 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—testing, for the first time, whether spatial frequency information contributes to cross-cultural differences in memory. Test materials were images of natural and constructed scenes whose spatial structure was manipulated 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 nonmatching images for certain targets. Specifically, North American subjects made reliably 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.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.3758/s13414-025-03094-7.

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