Perception and memory across viewpoint changes in moving images

Current understanding of scene perception derives largely from experiments using static scenes and psychological understanding of how moving images are processed is under-developed. We examined eye movement patterns and recognition memory performance as observers looked at short movies involving a change in viewpoint (a cut). At the time of the cut, four types of object property (color, position, identity and shape) were manipulated. Results show differential sensitivity to object property changes, reflected in both eye movement behavior after the cut and memory performance when object properties are remembered after viewing. When object properties change across a cut, memory is generally biased towards information present after the cut, except for position information which showed no bias. Our findings suggest that spatial information is represented differently to other forms of object information when viewing movies that include changes in viewpoint.