What is memorable across the Pacific Ocean shows evidence of prior learning on the memorability of new visual inputs

Abstract

It has been proposed that certain objects in our environment are inherently memorable due to fundamental similarities in how the human brain stores this visual information. Here we tested this hypothesis by having two groups of participants from opposite sides of the planet remember pictures of objects shown individually from several seconds each. We found that the specific objects that were more memorable varied across groups, with fine-grained analysis of the nonoverlapping objects indicating that participants have greater facility storing objects that are familiar to them as they occur in their cultural context. Thus, the present findings demonstrate that the memorability of a stimulus is jointly determined by its features and the learning history of the human brain in which it is being stored.