期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：2022
卷号：119
期号：4
DOI：10.1073/pnas.2119614119
语种：English
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：Significance
It is unclear what makes some of the numerous visual scenes we encounter every day memorable (while others are not) when we make no intentional effort to memorize them. Here, we reasoned that although visual perception is somewhat size invariant (e.g., we can recognize a person from multiple distances), visual memory would depend on image size. Across experiments, where participants freely viewed images without any memory- or nonmemory-related task (similar to naturalistic visual behavior), larger images were remembered better than smaller ones (about 1.5 times better), and this effect was proportional to image size. Our study indicates that physical stimulus dimensions (as the size of an image) influence memory, and this may have significant implications to learning, aging, development, etc.
We are constantly exposed to multiple visual scenes, and while freely viewing them without an intentional effort to memorize or encode them, only some are remembered. It has been suggested that image memory is influenced by multiple factors, such as depth of processing, familiarity, and visual category. However, this is typically investigated when people are instructed to perform a task (e.g., remember or make some judgment about the images), which may modulate processing at multiple levels and thus, may not generalize to naturalistic visual behavior. Visual memory is assumed to rely on high-level visual perception that shows a level of size invariance and therefore is not assumed to be highly dependent on image size. Here, we reasoned that during naturalistic vision, free of task-related modulations, bigger images stimulate more visual system processing resources (from retina to cortex) and would, therefore, be better remembered. In an extensive set of seven experiments, naïve participants (
n = 182) were asked to freely view presented images (sized 3° to 24°) without any instructed encoding task. Afterward, they were given a surprise recognition test (midsized images, 50% already seen). Larger images were remembered better than smaller ones across all experiments (∼20% higher accuracy or ∼1.5 times better). Memory was proportional to image size, faces were better remembered, and outdoors the least. Results were robust even when controlling for image set, presentation order, screen resolution, image scaling at test, or the amount of information. While multiple factors affect image memory, our results suggest that low- to high-level processes may all contribute to image memory.
