Abstract
Humans have a remarkable fidelity for visual long-term memory, and yet the composition of these memories is a longstanding debate in cognitive psychology. While much of the work on long-term memory has focused on processes associated with successful encoding and retrieval, more recent work on visual object recognition has developed a focus on the memorability of specific visual stimuli. Such work is engendering a view of object representation as a hierarchical movement from low-level visual representations to higher level categorical organization of conceptual representations. However, studies on object recognition often fail to account for how these high- and low-level features interact to promote distinct forms of memory. Here, we use both visual and semantic factors to investigate their relative contributions to two different forms of memory of everyday objects. We first collected normative visual and semantic feature information on 1,000 object images. We then conducted a memory study where we presented these same images during encoding (picture target) on Day 1, and then either a Lexical (lexical cue) or Visual (picture cue) memory test on Day 2. Our findings indicate that: (1) higher level visual factors (via DNNs) and semantic factors (via feature-based statistics) make independent contributions to object memory, (2) semantic information contributes to both true and false memory performance, and (3) factors that predict object memory depend on the type of memory being tested. These findings help to provide a more complete picture of what factors influence object memorability. These data are available online upon publication as a public resource.
Highlights
One of the most important issues in memory research is why we remember some things but forget others
The current study goes beyond memorability studies that examined a single memory task (Isola et al, 2014), and establishes a bridge between this work focused on stimulus factors, and those that focus on memory processes
While both forms of memory are supported by complex semantic properties, these results do suggest that the predictive properties for image memorability begin to diverge somewhat depending on how memory is tested, and fight against the idea that image memorability is an intrinsic property of an object image
Summary
One of the most important issues in memory research is why we remember some things but forget others To address this issue, it is critical to answer which processes lead to successful encoding (e.g., depth of encoding effects; see Craik & Tulving, 1975) and/or retrieval (e.g., transfer-appropriate processing; see Morris et al, 1977), and what contents of these events are more memorable than others. It is critical to answer which processes lead to successful encoding (e.g., depth of encoding effects; see Craik & Tulving, 1975) and/or retrieval (e.g., transfer-appropriate processing; see Morris et al, 1977), and what contents of these events are more memorable than others These two questions are Cambridge, UK 4 Department of Psychology & Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA closely related, their focus is different: the former concentrates on the actions of the person remembering, and the latter on properties of the stimuli.
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