This seminar will also stream via Zoom. For the link, please email: jmarcus@upenn.edu

Wilma Bainbridge
Department of Psychology
University of Chicago

Memory is predictable from our visual world

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), and that we may need to move outside traditional Euclidean spaces to understand how we represent our memories (Lee et al., 2024 preprint).