Children develop adult-like visual sensitivity to image memorability by the age of 4.

Abstract

Adults have been shown to consistently remember and forget certain images despite large individual differences, suggesting a population-wide sensitivity to an image's intrinsic memorability-a measure of how successfully an image is remembered. While a decade of research has focused on image memorability among adults, the developmental trajectory of these consistencies in memory is understudied. Here, we investigate by what age children gain adult-like sensitivity to the image memorability effect. We utilized data from Saragosa-Harris et al. (2021), where 137 children aged between 3 and 5 years old encoded animal-scene image pairs and then after a 5-min, 24-hr, or 1-week delay performed a cued recognition task for each scene target given its animal cue. We tested adults' memory of the same scene images using ResMem (Needell & Bainbridge, 2022), a pretrained deep neural network that predicts adult image memorability scores, and using an online behavioral continuous recognition task (N = 116). Results showed that ResMem predictions, as a proxy of adults' memory, predicted scene memory of children by the age of 4 and were the most predictive of children's memory across ages after a long, 1-week delay. Children at age 3 show nonadult-like consistent memory patterns, implying that the nonadult-like memory patterns were not due to poor memory performance. Instead, 3-year-olds may have consistently used certain visual memory strategies that become less optimal as they age. Our results suggest that adult-like sensitivity to image memorability emerges by the age of 4 through experience. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).