The temporal and spatial properties of memorability reveal insights into the art creation process

When creating art, artists must make constant decisions with each pen stroke 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 as it is being created. 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, mid-level visual features, neural network-derived 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; rather more global measures of simplicity and variability relate to the memorability of a piece. Further, 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 from the very beginning, and changes that occur later have diminishing impact on the memorability of a piece. These findings have important implications for both artists and psychologists in thinking about the factors that impact memory during the creation of an image.