Memorability: Reconceptualizing Memory as a Visual Attribute

In the world of visual memory, we often focus our study on the process of memory, but equally important are the inputs to the process—the images we are remembering. A growing body of work has shown that images have a strong power over what we will remember or forget; images have an intrinsic memorability that causes them to be remembered or forgotten across people. In this chapter, I describe our current understanding of memorability as a stimulus property, and its relationship to various aspects of vision and memory. The memorability of an image remains consistent across people, tasks, images, and timing, and shows specific stereotyped patterns in the brain that are separate from those of perception and memory. Recent evidence has proposed that memorability could represent how perceived inputs are prioritized for memory encoding. Although there is currently no comprehensive model of what makes something memorable, deep learning has shown strides in being able to predict and manipulate the memorability of an image. Armed with the memorability scores of an image, one can then create high-powered memory experiments, or develop tests that can more efficiently identify cognitive decline. There are still many open questions about memorability, but a deeper understanding will promise to give us agency over our memories and the images that create them.