Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Visual memory can be understood as an inferential process thatcombines noisy information about the world with knowledgedrawn from experience. Biases can arise during encoding ofinformation from the outside world into internal representa-tions, or during retrieval. In this work, we use the methodof serial reproduction, in which information is passed along achain of participants who try to recreate what they observed.We apply this method to the study of visual perception in thecontext of spatial memory biases for the remembered positionof dots inside different geometric shapes. We present the re-sults of non-parametric kernel density estimation of the end re-sult of serial reproduction to model visual biases. We confirmprevious findings, and show that memory biases revealed withour method are often more intricate and complex than whathad previously been reported, suggesting that serial reproduc-tion can be effective for studying perceptual priors.