Children develop adult-like visual sensitivity to image memorability by the age of 4.

Abstract

Adults have been shown to consistently remember and forget certain images despite large individual differences, suggesting a population-wide sensitivity to an image's intrinsic memorability-a measure of how successfully an image is remembered. While a decade of research has focused on image memorability among adults, the developmental trajectory of these consistencies in memory is understudied. Here, we investigate by what age children gain adult-like sensitivity to the image memorability effect. We utilized data from Saragosa-Harris et al. (2021), where 137 children aged between 3 and 5 years old encoded animal-scene image pairs and then after a 5-min, 24-hr, or 1-week delay performed a cued recognition task for each scene target given its animal cue. We tested adults' memory of the same scene images using ResMem (Needell & Bainbridge, 2022), a pretrained deep neural network that predicts adult image memorability scores, and using an online behavioral continuous recognition task (N = 116). Results showed that ResMem predictions, as a proxy of adults' memory, predicted scene memory of children by the age of 4 and were the most predictive of children's memory across ages after a long, 1-week delay. Children at age 3 show nonadult-like consistent memory patterns, implying that the nonadult-like memory patterns were not due to poor memory performance. Instead, 3-year-olds may have consistently used certain visual memory strategies that become less optimal as they age. Our results suggest that adult-like sensitivity to image memorability emerges by the age of 4 through experience. Public Significance StatementThis study strongly suggests that children older than 4 years old tend to remember and forget the same images as adults. We recommend teachers and caregivers utilize the ResMem deep neural network to select memorable images to be used in educational settings.

Memory augmentation with an adaptive cognitive interface

“…For example, our current approach could be employed in educational settings to present the least memorable concepts when students are most attentive (Guo & Bainbridge, 2023). For example, when learning a foreign language, memorable or forgettable vocabulary could be strategically presented contingent to the learner's attentional state.…”

“…New work has found that abstract visualizations (Borkin et al, 2013;Roberts et al, 2023), words (Tuckute et al, 2018), drawings (Han et al, 2023), paintings (Davis & Bainbridge, 2023), and even dance moves (Ongchoco et al, 2023) are reliably remembered or forgotten across individuals. The intrinsic memorability of an image even predicts later recognition over longer timescales (e.g., when tested after a one-week retention interval; Goetschalckx et al, 2018), predicts memory in naturalistic museum settings (Davis & Bainbridge, 2023), and captures memory performance in children as young as four years old (Guo & Bainbridge, 2023). Intrinsic memorability, therefore, is widely considered to be a feature that is inherent to a stimulus, and that is predictive of memory across a range of contexts and populations.…”

Visual Memory for Natural Scenes

“…How memorable an image is within an image set remains consistent when tested using different groups of observers (Isola et al, 2011;Jeong, 2023;Lu et al, 2020) and is predictable using a deep neural network trained to capture image intrinsic properties (Khosla et al, 2015;Needell & Bainbridge, 2022). The memorability effect, where humans reliably remember certain stimuli better than others, has been robustly shown across age, delay, and experimental paradigm: (1) recent work suggests that children, starting at age four (Guo & Bainbridge, 2023), and adolescents (Almog et al, 2021) remember the same set of scene images as adults; (2) scene images that are consistently better remembered by adults with a short delay (20 minutes) are also better remembered after longer delays (one day or one week) (Goetschalckx et al, 2018); (3) the memorability effect has been robustly measured using various encoding and testing paradigms (Bainbridge, 2020;Bainbridge et al, 2013;Xie et al, 2020), even with surprise memory tests .…”

“…Although young children's visual memory system is sensitive to similar scene properties as adults, their memories are prone to decay by adulthood. Eventually, young children can better remember the same images as adults by age four (Guo & Bainbridge, 2023), and similar to adults, they can remember a large set of object images with details (Ferrara et al, 2017). Nevertheless, the presence of childhood amnesia suggests that neural circuits underlying scene memories continue to develop into adulthood.…”