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Image Memorability in the Eye of the Beholder: Tracking the Decay of Visual Scene Representations

Melissa Le-Hoa Võ, Zoya Bylinskii, Aude Oliva
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/141044
Melissa Le-Hoa Võ
1Scene Grammar Lab, Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany
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Zoya Bylinskii
2Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
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Aude Oliva
2Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
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ABSTRACT

Some images stick in your mind for days or even years, while others seem to vanish quickly from memory. We tested whether differences in image memorability 1) are already evident immediately after encoding, 2) produce different rates of forgetting, and 3) whether the retrieval of images with different memorability scores affords differential degrees of cognitive load, mirrored by graded pupillary and blink rate responses. We monitored participants’ eye activity while they viewed a sequence of >1200 images in a repetition detection paradigm. 240 target images from 3 non-overlapping memorability classes were repeated at 4 different lags. Overall, performance decreased log-linearly with time. Differences in memorability were already visible at the shortest lag (~ 20 sec) and became more pronounced as time passed on. The rate of forgetting was steepest for low memorable images. We found that pupils dilated significantly more to correctly identified targets than correctly rejected distractors. Importantly, this “pupil old/new effect” increased with increasing number of lags and decreasing image memorability. A similar modulation of blink rates corroborated these findings. These results suggest that during memory retrieval of scenes, image inherent characteristics pose differential degrees of cognitive load on observers as seen in their eyes.

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The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted May 24, 2017.
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Image Memorability in the Eye of the Beholder: Tracking the Decay of Visual Scene Representations
Melissa Le-Hoa Võ, Zoya Bylinskii, Aude Oliva
bioRxiv 141044; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/141044
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Image Memorability in the Eye of the Beholder: Tracking the Decay of Visual Scene Representations
Melissa Le-Hoa Võ, Zoya Bylinskii, Aude Oliva
bioRxiv 141044; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/141044

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