Despite decades of study of memory, it remains unclear what makes an image memorable. There is considerable debate surrounding the underlying determinants of memory, including the roles of semantic (e.g., animacy, utility) and visual features (e.g., brightness) as well as whether the most prototypical or most atypical items are best remembered. Prior studies have relied on constrained stimulus sets, limiting any generalized view of the features that may contribute to memory. Here, we collected over one million memory ratings (N=13,946) for THINGS (Hebart et al., 2019), a naturalistic dataset of 26,107 object images designed to comprehensively sample concrete objects. First, we establish a model of object features that is predictive of image memorability, capturing over half of the explainable variance. For this model, we find that semantic features have a stronger influence than visual features on what people will remember. Second, we examined whether memorability could be accounted for by the typicality of the objects, by comparing human behavioral data, object feature dimensions, and deep neural network features. While prototypical objects tend to be the most memorable, the relationship between memorability and typicality is more complex than a simple positive or negative association and typicality alone cannot account for memorability.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENTWhy is it that we seem to remember and forget the same things? Our lived experiences differ, but there is remarkable consistency in what is remembered across people. Here, we collected memory performance scores for a comprehensive and diverse collection of natural object images to identify which properties determine our ability to remember. We created a model for predicting memory from object features showing that semantic properties more than visual properties contribute primarily to memorability. Further, we find that it is neither the most prototypical or atypical images that are best remembered, which suggests that typicality alone cannot account for memorability. Our findings challenge decades of prior research that suggest that the most atypical items are most memorable, informing our understanding of the features and organizational principles of memory.

What makes certain images more memorable than others? While much of memory research has focused on participant effects, recent studies using a stimulus-centric perspective have sparked debate on the determinants of memory, including the roles of semantic and visual features and whether the most prototypical or atypical items are best remembered. Prior studies have typically relied on constrained stimulus sets, limiting a generalized view of the features underlying what we remember. Here, we collected more than 1 million memory ratings for a naturalistic dataset of 26,107 object images designed to comprehensively sample concrete objects. We establish a model of object features that is predictive of image memorability and examined whether memorability could be accounted for by the typicality of the objects. We find that semantic features exert a stronger influence than perceptual features on what we remember and that the relationship between memorability and typicality is more complex than a simple positive or negative association alone.

Performance on an emotional stop-signal task designed to assess emotional response inhibition has been associated with Negative Urgency and psychopathology, particularly self-injurious behaviors. Indeed, difficulty inhibiting prepotent negative responses to aversive stimuli on the emotional stop-signal task (i.e. poor negative emotional response inhibition) partially explains the association between Negative Urgency and non-suicidal self-injury. Here, we combine existing data sets from clinical (hospitalised psychiatric inpatients) and non-clinical (community/student participants) samples aged 18–65 years ( N = 450) to examine the psychometric properties of this behavioural task and evaluate hypotheses that emotional stop-signal task metrics relate to distinct impulsive traits among participants who also completed the UPPS-P ( n = 223). We specifically predicted associations between worse negative emotional response inhibition (i.e. commission errors during stop-signal trials representing negative reactions to unpleasant images) and Negative Urgency, whereas commission errors to positive stimuli – reflecting worse positive emotional response inhibition – would relate to Positive Urgency. Results support the emotional stop-signal task’s convergent and discriminant validity: as hypothesised, poor negative emotional response inhibition was specifically associated with Negative Urgency and no other impulsive traits on the UPPS-P. However, we did not find the hypothesised association between positive emotional response inhibition and Positive Urgency. Correlations between emotional stop-signal task performance and self-report measures were the modest, similar to other behavioural tasks. Participants who completed the emotional stop-signal task twice ( n = 61) additionally provide preliminary evidence for test–retest reliability. Together, findings suggest adequate reliability and validity of the emotional stop-signal task to derive candidate behavioural markers of neurocognitive functioning associated with Negative Urgency and psychopathology.