Effects of physical viewpoint and individual differences in imagery vividness on recognition decision

Human memory, which involves reconstruction rather than providing a perfect record of past experiences, can lead not only to true but also to erroneous recognition judgement. In this study, we examined how retrieval viewpoint interacts with individual differences in visual imagery to influence recognition judgements. Participants viewed a 360° recording of a neutral scene via a head-mounted display and, after a one-week delay, performed a recognition task from either the original first-person perspective or a bird’s-eye viewpoint. The results revealed an interaction between viewpoint and imagery vividness: In the first-person viewpoint, visual imagery vividness did not affect recognition judgement, whereas visual imagery vividness did have such an influence in the bird’s-eye viewpoint condition; namely, decreasing visual imagery vividness was associated with a more liberal tendency to respond “old” across both studied and nonstudied items. Analyses of the hit and false alarm rates observed in this context indicated that these effects were driven by shifts in response bias rather than discrimination ability, thus suggesting that viewpoint and imagery influence recognition judgements without reliably affecting sensitivity. These findings reveal that retrieval conditions involving different physical viewpoints can interact with imagery vividness to influence recognition judgements.