Your memory of a photo zooms out past its actual edges

Shown a close-up photograph for a few seconds, then asked to draw it from memory, people reliably draw a wider view than they saw, inventing plausible background beyond the original frame. Helene Intraub and Michael Richardson called this 'boundary extension,' and it shows up within seconds of viewing, with real scenes as well as photos. Visual memory seems to automatically extrapolate what must lie just outside the picture.

— Helene Intraub and Michael Richardson, Wide-Angle Memories of Close-Up Scenes — Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 1989

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