The creation of artwork reveals temporal and spatial properties of memorability

By shifting focus away from viewers and instead toward stimuli, memorability research has made unique contributions to our understanding of human memory. Previous work has shown that in addition to stimuli including faces, naturalistic scenes, and objects, paintings have an intrinsic memorability (Davis & Bainbridge, 2023). This means that our memories of artworks are consistent despite art’s connotation as a subjective field. We developed a database of over 2,500 still images collected from 50 artworks whereby their memorability was tracked over time as they were created. Here, we use this database to dive into the temporal and spatial properties that underlie changes in memorability. All changes to the artworks were tracked and labeled by artists as one of three categories: sketches, blockings, or details; details produce the smallest changes in memorability and blockings produce the greatest change. We also observed a significant, positive relationship between the number of pixels that changed and the change in memorability. Further, we found that visual features including color and clutter have no significant impact on an artwork’s memorability. However, not all changes are created equal; by taking the difference between subsequent images and converting them to a binary mask, we determined that centrally-focused changes impact memorability the most, and this impact significantly decreases as distance from the center of the image increases. When looking at raw changes in memorability, paintings with localized changes higher up in the y-axis have a greater memorability. Additionally, artworks with a one-point perspective have a significantly lower memorability than those that do not. These results suggest that an image’s memorability is strongly influenced by its composition. Artists, designers, and researchers alike are implicated by these findings that better our understanding of what makes an image memorable.