CAMBRIDGE, Mass., May 24 (UPI) -- The most memorable photos depict people, followed by indoor scenes and human-scale objects, while landscapes are largely forgettable, a U.S. study found.
Neuroscientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studying what makes images memorable, say they'll present their findings at a conference on computer vision and pattern recognition in June in Colorado, an MIT release reported Tuesday.
"Pleasantness and memorability are not the same," MIT graduate student Phillip Isola said.
The study is the first to investigate what makes an image memorable, a characteristic long thought outside scientific examination because visual memory can be subjective.
"People did not think it was possible to find anything consistent," Aude Oliva, MIT professor of cognitive science, said.
However, the MIT team was surprised to find remarkable consistency among hundreds of people who participated in the memory experiments. Research has shown the human brain can remember thousands of images in great detail, but that not all images are equally memorable.
Study participants were shown a series of images, some of which were repeated, and asked to indicate when an image appeared they had already seen. The research found that images with people in them are the most memorable, followed by images of human-scale space -- such as the produce aisle of a grocery store -- and close-ups of objects.
Least memorable are natural landscapes, although those can be memorable if they feature an unexpected element, such as shrubbery trimmed into an unusual shape, the researchers said.
