![]() Whatever is influencing the memorability of images, it’s not something we’re consciously aware of. The findings hold true across different categories of images: Some faces are more memorable than others, some scenes are more memorable than others, and even some random noise images - scrambled, unrecognizable fields of light and color - are more memorable than others. In study after study, researchers have found that some images leave a much more lasting impression. The MIT memory game studies asked whether some images are inherently more likely to be remembered than others. Some images stick vividly in our minds, while others may fade away even when we actively try to remember them. We’re capable of recognizing tens of thousands of images we’ve seen before. Previous research shows humans are really good at this sort of recognition game. ![]() If a participant recognized a photo they’d actually seen before, it counted as being remembered. Cognitive scientist Aude Oliva and her colleagues showed study participants a series of images like the eight photos I was given, and then quizzed them later on which ones they recognized. In the early 2010s, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology started probing memorability by asking participants to play an experimental game. The smaller slices can lead to some fascinating conclusions. ![]() Instead, in labs, researchers can really only study it in smaller slices, and then try to figure out what it all means in the bigger picture. ![]() No experiment can capture the whole of our human experience with memory and explain every instance of it. You can remember historical facts like when the state fair was founded you can remember the directions for how to get to the fairgrounds.Įxactly how all of these sources of memory work together, and exactly how they are different and the same, is a source of endless scholarship in psychology. You might use working memory for holding a few digits in your head while you go to unlock a keypad episodic memory to recall a school trip to the state fair from when you were 10 sensory memory to conjure up the smells of the funnel cakes there. It’s one word, but it stands for a lot of different things our brains can do. Which is making scientists wonder: Can they help engineer more memorable images - for classrooms, for maps, for the memory-impaired? Can they help design a more memorable world? So much our minds encounter eventually slips away. What’s puzzling, and a bit provocative, is that artificial intelligence is getting remarkably good at predicting which images the human brain is going to remember, even outperforming our own human intuitions. And with a better understanding of how, scientists can perhaps come up with ways to fix lapses in memory. But cognitive psychologists hope that asking what we remember will start to teach them how we remember. No scientist is perfectly sure how the brain physically sorts and stores all the information - and all the types of information - that gets encoded into memories. Memory still looms as a big mystery in science. While memory is what helps us recall things we’ve encountered or thought of before, studies of memorability ask: Why do we remember what we remember? Why do we forget what we forget? On any given day, we’re bombarded with images - in the news, on TV, on Instagram, faces we encounter on the street, scenes we see outside a car window - and some of those images stick around in our brains. Courtesy of Wilma Bainbridgeīainbridge wasn’t asking about my memory, but memorability. The women seemed to have equally kind smiles, so why would I remember one more than the other? And the beaches, well, they both seemed like boring postcards. That’s a place I’d want to eat a big bowl of pasta and laugh with friends. ![]() I’d choose the dining room with the tree over the sad office cubicle. He was more classically handsome with swooshy hair, deep-set eyes, and superhero-square jawline, compared to the smirking man in the top row (sorry, dude). Maybe, I thought, I’d remember the man in the bottom row if I saw him again. These were the kinds of mundane photos we may come across every day - two men, two women, a dining room and an empty cubicle in an office, two tropical beaches. None of the images seemed particularly striking. Wilma Bainbridge, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Chicago, recently showed me eight images and asked me to guess: Which ones will I remember? For each pair, she hinted, one image would be more likely to stick in my mind. Part of the Memory Issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world. ![]()
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