People remember having seen more of a scene than was actually shown, filling in beyond the edges of the view.
Intraub and Richardson found that subjects asked to draw or recognise a photographed scene reliably included regions outside the original frame. The account is that perception constructs a continuous surrounding world rather than storing a bounded image, so the remembered scene inherits the extrapolation. The error occurs within seconds and is not corrected by warning.
In practice
- A witness describes a wider view than the camera in the same position recorded.
- A reader recalls context from a chart that the chart did not contain.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Psychology & Behavior
- Essay
- A century and a half of measuring the mind