The Artwork Creation Process Reveals Temporal and Spatial Properties of Memorability

When creating art, artists must make constant decisions with each penstroke in order to achieve their goals of the piece. One common goal is to create something memorable—a piece that will persist in the memories of the observer. However, an open question is how different artistic decisions impact the memorability of a piece—how can one intentionally create memorable art? To test this question, we utilized a neural network (ResMem) to track the frame-by-frame changes in memorability for 50 videos of the creation of digital art pieces. We tested this neural network’s predictions via a human memory experiment (N=399), finding that ResMem’s predictions significantly correlated with human memory performance across the art creation process. We then collected multiple measures of each piece’s creation process, including low-level visual features, artistic features, and spatial properties. We find that changes in details and low-level visual features do not contribute to the memorability of a piece. However, larger changes (e.g., blocking, sketching), particularly below the horizon of the image, make the biggest impacts on memorability. Importantly, we find that the memorability of a piece is largely set at its initial composition, and pieces tend to become more forgettable (yet more varied in memorability) past that stage. These findings have important implications for both artists and psychologists in thinking about the factors that impact memory during the creation of an image.