Slashdot Mirror
What Makes a Photograph Memorable?
Hugh Pickens writes "Researchers have developed a computer algorithm that can rank images based on memorability. They found that in general, 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. Researchers built a collection of about 10,000 images of all kinds for the study — interior-design photos, nature scenes, streetscapes and others, and human subjects who participated through Amazon's Mechanical Turk program were told to indicate, by pressing a key on their keyboard, when an image appeared that they had already seen. The researchers then used machine-learning techniques to create a computational model that analyzed the images and their memorability as rated by humans by analyzing various statistics — such as color, or the distribution of edges — and correlated them with the image's memorability. 'There has been a lot of work in trying to understand what makes an image interesting, or appealing, or what makes people like a particular image,' says Alexei Efros at Carnegie Mellon University. 'What [the MIT researchers] did was basically approach the problem from a very scientific point of view and say that one thing we can measure is memorability.' Researchers believe the algorithm may be useful (PDF) to graphic designers, photo editors, or anyone trying to decide which of their vacation photos to post on Facebook."
Appearance of Forrest Gump is undoubtely a plus.
Achille Talon
Hop!
An unfeasibly large anus.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
...Are not that memorable to me, unless they're out of the ordinary in some way. Usually a bad way. I will never get the image of weird, concave-looking nipples out of my brain, no matter how much bleach I drink.
I do wonder if there's a whole slew of fun we could discover with this, though. I suck at remembering people's faces; and I suck at accurately remembering images involving people.
At the same time, I rule at 'other' things. For example, there's a picture of my desk from my apartment in college sitting on my NAS. Haven't looked at it in at least six years. I can tell you there's a can of Mountain Dew, logo clearly facing the camera, sitting approximately three inches to the forward/right quadrant of a grey, two-button wheel mouse. A circular glass ashtray, six inches in diameter, sits behind the keyboard, overflowing with the butts of Djarum Black. And my caps lock key is on. ...Maybe this has to do with 'color, or the distribution of edges'. But seriously, I'm much better at remembering completely boring and random scenery than I am people. Especially women. I tend to remember women in pictures as idealized versus the actual photography. Wait, maybe my memory is like Photoshop, rather than faulty. :P
What a strange study. From the summary, the researchers sampled a group of individuals by presenting them with random photographs and rating not their _memorability_ but rather recall in asking them to press a key "when an image appeared that they had already seen". This is much different than what I believe makes a photograph memorable--which typically involves some sort of an emotional response to the subject in photograph. For instance, nature pictures taken on a journey to me personally would be very memorable--even though the study suggests otherwise.
If you're in marketing and want people to "recall" your product, yeah sure, this study is relevant. But, it's sort of misleading labeling it memorable as it suggests an emotional response and this study does not address that.
By the way, the definition of "memorable" is the quality of being worth remembering--very different from recall.
Of course things with people and animals (or representations thereof) are more memorable than landscapes. Our minds have evolved to put greater emphasis on things that are a threat or opportunity. Besides, landscapes are generally classified as that only because they're outdoors and don't have any other distinguishing characteristics that would put it into another group.
Knowledge Brings Fear
They should consult with more photographers. One thing is obvious: the most-memorable pictures have a central point of focus...something to grab your interest. The least memorable images in the TFA have nothing to grab your attention. That applies to a mixture of subject matter as well as a single subject, such as landscapes.
The TFA gave short shrift to aesthetics, too--where in the photo the central point of focus most favorably may be placed, such as the Rule of Thirds and Golden Sections. These go back to Da Vinci...not new ideas.
Said that one thing that makes a photo interesting is a pic of something common in one location, that is shown in another location where that thing is not common. There is no way an algorithm could describe that.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Other criticism of the study aside, a group of people who might be interested in how well pictures are remembered after short glances are advertisers and marketers.
they fscked that study up real good.
personally I remember a really good sunset, or an awesome view of nature far more than I remember a friggin grocery store. heck there are two that I go into regularly and one I rarely go into and the one I rarely visit I can't find anything in it.
human sized spaces aren't more memorable. what it contains and that means to the viewer is what is rememberable.
Part of it is due to a literal interpretation of the word "memorable". There's a difference between easy to remember, which is what they've measured, and deemed worthy of committing to memory, which is more a more arbitrary consideration. If you see images of a supermarket isle, it might be memorable in that you'll be able to tell you've already seen that picture, but it's not memorable in the sense that most people use the word. It's not that they deem the picture special, it's just that our brains are able to recognize it without effort...you need to remember unimportant things like that in order to navigate places you've been to before, even if these places are completely uninteresting.
My field of work has nothing to do with this, so I may be off in this belief, but I would expect humans who live their lives in less urban settings to have an easier time remembering pictures of natural landscapes. We've trained ourselves to navigate supermarkets, but for most of us, a bunch of trees are just a bunch of trees. Those who actually can navigate the woods without getting lost probably have trained their brain to pay more attention to the differences, and thus should be able to remember if they've seen a picture of a particular natural landscape vs another far more easily.
I address this question in a (to be published) book on the psychology of entertainment where I explore the concept of novelty. Although mere newness is not enough to make something memorable, if something combines a strong design structure or a vivid one, and is both personally and culturally novel, its memorability is greatly increased. When we are young (immature experientially), almost everything is novel and gets consideration as we take in perceptions. Repeated patterns in the environment are assimilated into recognizers, so that we can detect what is unusual and possibly a threat. (Ie. that which is out of place invokes attention, leading to better chance of survival from potential threats.) I believe that the same mechanisms, with varied parameters, then serve multiple purposes including artistic perception. mechanics of reading, and so on. I am engaged in an ongoing effort to embed this principle in hybrid symbolic and neural recognizer systems, as part of a larger effort. Anyway, I leave the take-away point that memorability is a function of both perceptual system operation and interpretive deep systems drawing on culturebases, hence novelty and memorability is dependent on individual (per person) frameworks.