Shared memories driven by the intrinsic memorability of items
This work provides insights into shared memory mechanisms, which is foundational for understanding human cognition and has implications for fields like psychology and neuroscience, though it is incremental as it reviews existing research.
The chapter addresses the problem of why certain visual items are consistently remembered or forgotten across individuals, revealing that intrinsic memorability is driven by the visual world itself and processed automatically by the brain. It synthesizes state-of-the-art findings on memorability, highlighting its role in perception and memory prioritization.
When we experience an event, it feels like our previous experiences, our interpretations of that event (e.g., aesthetics, emotions), and our current state will determine how we will remember it. However, recent work has revealed a strong sway of the visual world itself in influencing what we remember and forget. Certain items -- including certain faces, words, images, and movements -- are intrinsically memorable or forgettable across observers, regardless of individual differences. Further, neuroimaging research has revealed that the brain is sensitive to memorability both rapidly and automatically during late perception. These strong consistencies in memory across people may reflect the broad organizational principles of our sensory environment, and may reveal how the brain prioritizes information before encoding items into memory. In this chapter, I will discuss our current state-of-the-art understanding of memorability for visual information, and what these findings imply about how we perceive and remember visual events.