The Resiliency of Memorability: A Predictor of Memory Separate from Attention and Priming

When we encounter a new person or place, we may easily encode it into our memories, or we may quickly forget it. Recent work finds that this likelihood of encoding a given entity – memorability – is highly consistent across viewers and intrinsic to an image; people tend to remember and forget the same images. However, several forces influence our memories beyond the memorability of the stimulus itself – for example, how attention-grabbing the stimulus is, how much attentional resources we dedicate to the task, or how primed we are for that stimulus. How does memorability interact with these various phenomena, and could any of them explain the effects of memorability found in prior work? This study uses five psychophysical experiments to explore the link between memorability and three attention-related phenomena: 1) bottom-up attention (through testing spatial cueing and visual search), 2) topdown attention (through testing cognitive control and depth of encoding), and 3) priming. These experiments find that memorability remains resilient to all of these phenomena – none are able to explain memorability effects or overcome the strong effects memorability has on determining memory performance. Thus, memorability is truly an independent, intrinsic attribute of an image that works in conjunction with these phenomena to determine if an event will ultimately be remembered.