Perception en Provence Winter School
Date:
Why do some images stay with us long after we’ve seen them, while others are quickly forgotten? This property—called memorability—turns out to be surprisingly consistent across people: if an image is memorable for one person, it is likely to be memorable for others as well. This suggests that memorability is not just subjective, but reflects how our visual system processes and encodes information. To understand and influence memorability, we turn to artificial neural networks (ANNs), computer models inspired by the brain. Modern vision models, such as those used in object recognition, have been shown to closely resemble how the human visual system—particularly the ventral visual stream—represents images. Because of this similarity, they provide a useful tool for probing and predicting human perception. In our work, we use these models to estimate how memorable an image is, and then go a step further: we use them to modify images in ways that are predicted to increase or decrease their memorability. Importantly, these changes are subtle and preserve the overall content of the image. We then test these modified images in human participants to see whether their memory performance changes as expected.