Beyond the Edges of a Picture

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Abstract
Viewers remember having seen a greater expanse of a scene than was shown in a photograph: an error called boundary extension. Two experiments examined the cause of the distortion by presenting 303 undergraduates with close-up, prototypic, wide-angle, or inverted-close-up views of seven scenes. Stimulus durations of 4 or 15 s were tested. Results showed that boundary estension decreased with increasingly wide-angle views and that inverted pictures yielded as great a distortion as did pictures with a normal orientation. Results support the hypothesis that boundary extension is mediated by the activation of a perceptual schema during picture perception and does not simply reflect a tendency for subjects to remember having seen a prototypic view.

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