The Features Underlying the Memorability of Objects

Abstract

What makes certain images more memorable than others? While much of memory research has focused on participant effects, recent studies employing a stimulus-centric perspective have sparked debate on the determinants of memory, including the roles of semantic and visual features and whether the most prototypical or atypical items are best remembered. Prior studies have typically relied on constrained stimulus sets, limiting a generalized view of the features underlying what we remember. Here, we collected 1+ million memory ratings for a naturalistic dataset of 26,107 object images designed to comprehensively sample concrete objects. We establish a model of object features that is predictive of image memorability and examined whether memorability could be accounted for by the typicality of the objects. We find that semantic features exert a stronger influence than perceptual features on what we remember and that the relationship between memorability and typicality is more complex than a simple positive or negative association alone. TEASERSemantic versus perceptual features more heavily influence what we remember, and memorability cannot be reduced to typicality.