Enhanced memory for scenes presented at behaviorally relevant points in time

The ability to remember a briefly presented scene depends on a number of factors,such as its saliency,novelty,degree of threat,or behavioral relevance to a task. here,however,we show that the encoding of a scene into memory may depend not only on what the scene contains but also when it occurs. participants performed an attentionally demanding target detection task at fixation while also viewing a rapid sequence of full-field photographs of urban and natural scenes. participants were then tested on whether they recognized a specific scene from the previous sequence. we found that scenes were recognized reliably only when presented concurrently with a target at fixation. this is evidence of a mechanism where traces of a visual scene are automatically encoded into memory at behaviorally relevant points in time regardless of the spatial focus of attention. © 2010 lin et al.