The effect of image category and incidental arousal on boundary restriction

People’s memory for scenes has consequences, including for eyewitness testimony. Negative scenes may lead to a particular memory error, where narrowed scene boundaries lead people to recall being closer to a scene than they were. But boundary restriction—including attenuation of the opposite phenomenon boundary extension—has been difficult to replicate, perhaps because heightened arousal accompanying negative scenes, rather than negative valence itself, drives the effect. Indeed, in Green et al. (2019) arousal alone, conditioned to a particular neutral image category, increased boundary restriction for images in that category. But systematic differences between image categories may have driven these results, irrespective of arousal. Here, we clarify whether boundary restriction stems from the external arousal stimulus or image category differences. Presenting one image category (everyday-objects), half accompanied by arousal (Experiment 1), and presenting both neutral image categories (everyday-objects, nature), without arousal (Experiment 2), resulted in no difference in boundary judgement errors. These findings suggest that image features—including inherent valence, arousal, and complexity—are not sufficient to induce boundary restriction or reduce boundary extension for neutral images, perhaps explaining why boundary restriction is inconsistently demonstrated in the lab.