Memory for artwork is predictable

Abstract

Viewing art is often seen as a highly personal and subjective experience. However, are there universal factors that make a work of art memorable? We conducted three experiments, where we recorded online memory performance for 4,021 paintings from the Art Institute of Chicago, tested in-person memory after an unconstrained visit to the Art Institute, and obtained abstract attribute measures such as beauty and emotional valence for these pieces. Participants showed significant agreement in their memories both online and in-person, suggesting that pieces have an intrinsic "memorability" based solely on their visual properties that is predictive of memory in a naturalistic museum setting. Importantly, ResMem, a deep learning neural network designed to estimate image memorability, could significantly predict memory both online and in-person based on the images alone, and these predictions could not be explained by other low- or high-level attributes like color, content type, aesthetics, and emotion. A regression comprising ResMem and other stimulus factors could predict as much as half of the variance of in-person memory performance. Further, ResMem could predict the fame of a piece, despite having no cultural or historical knowledge. These results suggest that perceptual features of a painting play a major role in influencing its success, both in memory for a museum visit and in cultural memory over generations.

Keywords: art; memorability; naturalistic memory.

Fig. 1.

Methods for Experiments 1 to 3. (A) In an online experiment (Experiment 1), 3,216 participants performed a continuous recognition memory task, where they viewed images and pressed a key when they recognized an image from earlier in the sequence. (B) In an in-person experiment (Experiment 2), 19 new participants freely explored the Art Institute of Chicago, and then afterwards rated their memory for a set of target and foil paintings on their mobile phone. (C) In an online experiment (Experiment 3), 40 new participants provided ratings of beauty, emotion, interest, and familiarity for each painting.

Fig. 2.

Example pieces from the Art Institute of Chicago and their memorability scores. These examples show some of the most memorable and forgettable pieces, from Experiment 1 (online memory experiment, Top row), Experiment 2 (in-person museum memory experiment, Middle row), and neural network ResMem’s predictions (Bottom row). The score under each image is the memorability score from that set (ranging from 0 as most forgettable up to 1 as most memorable).

Fig. 3.

Map of the American Art wing at the Art Institute of Chicago. Numbers indicate the gallery room number. Each room is colored by the average in-person memorability (hit rate, HR) of the paintings within that room, where green rooms are more memorable and red rooms are more forgettable.