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Poster Session B: Wednesday, August 13, 1:00 – 4:00 pm, de Brug & E‑Hall

Nothing Intrinsically Memorable: The Relational Nature of Animacy Effects in Visual Memory

Dyllan Simpson¹, Benjamin Johnson¹, Timothy Brady¹; ¹University of California, San Diego

Presenter: Dyllan Simpson

Are some images intrinsically more memorable than others? Previous research has demonstrated that animate objects are remembered better, on average, than inanimate objects, leading to claims that animate features are intrinsically more memorable. We challenge this view by showing that the same animate objects are either highly memorable or highly forgettable depending solely on their representational distinctiveness to other objects in the study set. By manipulating the proportion of animate objects (10% vs. 90%, N=1600 objects) in our dataset, we created a reversal in how distinctive animate items were, on average, from all items according to neural data from IT cortex in macaques, and in a recognition memory experiment (N=93), this led to a complete reversal of traditional memory advantages for animate items. Overall, these findings demonstrate that animate stimuli do not have intrinsically higher memorability — instead, their higher memorability emerges from their relation to other items in memory.

Topic Area: Object Recognition & Visual Attention

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