Natural scenes are more compressible and less memorable than human-made scenes

Humans often cannot process all the information available within an environment, but instead filter out much of it. This study examines whether the extent of information filtering may differ between environments, specifically natural and human-made environments. Across three behavioral experiments and computational analysis of 108,754 scene images, we analyzed the spectral and edge content of scenes to quantify the proportion of noticeable information. Our findings reveal that natural scenes have a lower proportion of noticeable information compared to human-made scenes, resulting in higher compressibility. Furthermore, natural scenes were consistently less memorable than human-made scenes, suggesting that greater information filtering occurs during encoding into memory. The lower memorability of natural scenes was partially explained by their higher compressibility. Our results indicate that compressibility, or the density of noticeable information, could be a key feature distinguishing natural environments from human-made environments, potentially explaining the benefits of interacting with natural environments.