Matthew Buckley wins section award 2023
We’re delighted to announce the winner of 2023’s Cognitive Psychology Section award!
03 July 2023
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Matthew Buckley from Aston University is recognised for his paper 'The spatial layout of doorways and environmental boundaries shape the content of event memories' which was published in Cognition in August 2022.
We look forward to hearing about Matthew’s research when he gives the winner’s keynote presentation at our CogDev conference in September. Meanwhile, he had this to say about his research and winning the award.
Environmental boundaries
We experience a continuous stream of sensory information as we go about our daily lives, but our memories for what happened in the past are of separate events that occurred at a given time and place. Consequently, the continuous stream of sensory information that we experience must be separated into discrete episodes, a process known as event segmentation.
Recent literature has demonstrated that physical boundaries (e.g., the doorways in walls between different rooms) provide a cue for event segmentation; however, it was less known whether boundaries exert any influence on memories for the past beyond separating events.
To address this gap, we performed four experiments in which participants were given 15 minutes to explore a virtual environment that contained 36 objects that were spread equally amongst six differently coloured buildings, after which they were asked to recall where in the world they remembered encountering the objects.
Across our experiments we varied the spatial similarity of buildings, and the data revealed that the spatial properties of physical boundaries can promote or reduce interference between memories. When the boundary walls of the buildings shared the same shape and doorway locations, people confused where they had encountered the objects during the exploration phase of the experiment. However, as we altered the shape of the buildings and the location of the doorways in the buildings, people were more accurate in recalling which buildings contained the objects they saw when exploring the environment.
Our work helps us to understanding how spatial cognition and event memory are intertwined, and it goes without saying that we were delighted that it was awarded the BPS Cognitive Section prize.
