Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT, 06520-8205, United States of America.
Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT, 06520-8205, United States of America.
Cognition. 2021 Jul;212:104714. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104714. Epub 2021 May 7.
What determines how well people remember images? Most past research has explored properties of the people doing the remembering - such as their age, emotional state, or individual capacity. However, recent work has also characterized memorability - the likelihood of an image being remembered across observers. But what makes some images more memorable than others? Part of the answer must surely involve the meanings of the images, but here we ask whether this is the entire story: is there also purely visual memorability, driven not by semantic content but by perceptual features per se? We isolated visual memorability in an especially direct manner - by eliminating semantic content while retaining many visual properties. We did so by transforming a set of natural scene images using phase scrambling, and then testing memorability for both intact and scrambled images in independent samples. Across several experiments, observers saw sequences of images and responded anytime they saw a repeated image. We found reliable purely visual memorability at the temporal scales of both short-term memory (2-15 s) and longer-term memory (several minutes), and this could not be explained by the extent to which people could generate semantic labels for some scrambled images. Collectively, these results suggest that the memorability of images is a function not only of what they mean, but also of how they look in the first place.
是什么决定了人们对图像的记忆程度？过去的大多数研究都探讨了进行记忆的人的特性——例如他们的年龄、情绪状态或个人能力。然而，最近的研究也描述了可记性——图像在不同观察者中被记住的可能性。但是，是什么使某些图像比其他图像更令人难忘呢？答案的一部分肯定涉及图像的含义，但在这里我们要问的是，这是否就是全部的故事：是否存在纯粹的视觉可记性，其驱动力不是语义内容，而是感知特征本身？我们以一种特别直接的方式隔离了视觉可记性——在保留许多视觉属性的同时消除语义内容。我们通过使用相位扰乱来转换一组自然场景图像，然后在独立的样本中测试完整和扰乱图像的可记性。在几个实验中，观察者看到一系列图像，并在看到重复的图像时随时做出响应。我们发现了可靠的纯粹视觉可记性，其时间尺度涵盖了短期记忆（2-15 秒）和长期记忆（几分钟），并且这不能用人们可以为一些扰乱的图像生成语义标签的程度来解释。总的来说，这些结果表明，图像的可记性不仅是其含义的函数，而且首先是其外观的函数。
