Why are some images memorable?

THAT'S THE WHY:Many of us are bombarded by images every day – whether it's through the media, on advertising billboards and passing buses or even just scrolling through photos on our phones or cameras.

Why do some of those pictures lodge in our brains, while others seem to glide from our memories into the ether?

A new study at Massachusetts Institute of Technology set about identifying what makes an image memorable, looking beyond the obvious features like a loved one’s face, a famous person or a well-known monument.

“Are the images remembered by one person more likely to be remembered also by somebody else?” asked the researchers in a paper to be presented at a conference on computer vision and pattern recognition next month.

They compiled a database of thousands of images and asked more than 600 participants to watch streams of pictures on their computers and identify when they saw the same image more than once.

The study, which the researchers describe in the paper as “an initial benchmark”, found the most memorable photos were those that contained people.

Indoor scenes and human-scale objects also appeared to increase an image’s memorability, while general landscapes tended to be more forgettable.

The research is continuing, adding more image features such as people interacting to see how they affect memorability, according to a press release from MIT.