Colloquium: “Memory is predictable by the objects of our memory”
College of Science
Despite our unique individual differences, there’s a surprising consistency across people in their memories, where we tend to remember and forget the same images. This suggests that certain images are more memorable than others, and this effect is so pervasive that neural networks can predict people’s memories based on images alone. In this talk, I will demonstrate how predictable people’s memories are, even in real-world scenarios like remembering pieces from an art museum (Davis & Bainbridge, 2023). I will then present a framework suggesting that images that are counterintuitively more prototypical and easier to process may be those that end up being most memorable (Kramer et al., 2023).