December 2022
Volume 22, Issue 14
Open Access
Vision Sciences Society Annual Meeting Abstract  |   December 2022
Consistency in the paintings that people remember – The impact of memorability on art
Author Affiliations
  • Trent Davis
    University of Chicago
  • Wilma A. Bainbridge
    University of Chicago
Journal of Vision December 2022, Vol.22, 3723. doi:https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.22.14.3723
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      Trent Davis, Wilma A. Bainbridge; Consistency in the paintings that people remember – The impact of memorability on art. Journal of Vision 2022;22(14):3723. https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.22.14.3723.

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      © ARVO (1962-2015); The Authors (2016-present)

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Abstract

Every piece of artwork is unique, and viewing art is often seen as a subjective experience. Additionally, many works of art are made to last in people's memories and leave an impact on the viewer. However, what makes a work of art memorable? We determined and studied the memorability of 4,021 paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) both in an online and in-person task. In an online task, over 3,200 people participated in a continuous recognition task to determine the memorability scores of the paintings. Participants were significantly consistent in the pieces they remembered and forgot, and that memory performance was predictable by a neural network (ResMem; Needell & Bainbridge, 2021), showing that an objective memorability score can be quantified for a piece of art. We identified properties that influence memorability scores: paintings with text or unusual content tended to have higher memorability scores, and paintings with the lowest memorability scores were usually scenes or landscapes with little visual information and a darker color palette. Additionally, the paintings that caused the most false alarms tended to be beige landscapes or scenes. Importantly, famous pieces were judged as significantly more memorable by ResMem, suggesting that certain perceptual features of a painting can influence its success. For the in-person task, a separate set of participants walked through and observed 162 paintings on both the first and second floors of the American Art wing of the AIC. Participants answered a mobile experiment indicating which paintings they remembered seeing, intermixed with foils. Foil images were from the same region and time period as the targets, and many were by the same artists. We found that ResMem memorability scores were also able to predict in-person memory behavior, suggesting a consistent influence of images on our memories.

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