What moves us? The intrinsic memorability of dance.

Abstract

Our most moving experiences, the ones that "stick," are hardly ever static but are dynamic, like a conversation, a gesture, or a dance. Previous work has shown robust memory for simple actions (e.g., jumping or turning), but it remains an open question how we remember more dynamic sequences of complex and expressive actions. Separately, with static images, previous work has found remarkable consistency in which images are remembered or forgotten across people-that is, an intrinsic "memorability"-but it is unclear whether semantically ambiguous and expressive actions might similarly be consistently remembered, despite the varying interpretations of what they could mean. How do we go from static memories to more memorable dynamic experiences? Using the test case of a rich and abstract series of actions from dance, we discover memorability as an intrinsic attribute of movement. Across genres, some movements were consistently remembered, regardless of the perceiver, and even regardless of the dancer. Among a comprehensive set of memory, movement, and aesthetic attributes, consistency in which movements people remembered was most predicted by subjective memorability, and importantly by both subjective (observer ratings) and objective (optical flow analysis) measures of the scale of motion, such that the less overall motion in a dance segment, the more memorable the movements tended to be. Importantly, we discover that memorability of a sequence is additive, where the memorability of individual snapshots and constituent moments ultimately contribute to the memorability of longer sequences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).