Children Develop Adult-Like Visual Sensitivity to Image Memorability by the Age of 4

• Published in: Journal of experimental psychology. General 2024-02, Vol.153 (2), p.531-543
• Main Authors: Guo, Xiaohan (Hannah), Bainbridge, Wilma A.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Age Differences; Child development; Childhood Development; Cognitive ability; Deep Neural Networks; Female; Human; Male; Memory; Prediction; Visual Perception
• ISSN: 0096-3445; 1939-2222
• DOI: 10.1037/xge0001511

Adults have been shown to consistently remember and forget certain images despite large individual differences, suggesting a population-wide sensitivity to an image's intrinsic memorability-a measure of how successfully an image is remembered. While a decade of research has focused on image memorability among adults, the developmental trajectory of these consistencies in memory is understudied. Here, we investigate by what age children gain adult-like sensitivity to the image memorability effect. We utilized data from Saragosa-Harris et al. (2021), where 137 children aged between 3 and 5 years old encoded animal-scene image pairs and then after a 5-min, 24-hr, or 1-week delay performed a cued recognition task for each scene target given its animal cue. We tested adults' memory of the same scene images using ResMem (Needell & Bainbridge, 2022), a pretrained deep neural network that predicts adult image memorability scores, and using an online behavioral continuous recognition task (N = 116). Results showed that ResMem predictions, as a proxy of adults' memory, predicted scene memory of children by the age of 4 and were the most predictive of children's memory across ages after a long, 1-week delay. Children at age 3 show nonadult-like consistent memory patterns, implying that the nonadult-like memory patterns were not due to poor memory performance. Instead, 3-year-olds may have consistently used certain visual memory strategies that become less optimal as they age. Our results suggest that adult-like sensitivity to image memorability emerges by the age of 4 through experience. Public Significance StatementThis study strongly suggests that children older than 4 years old tend to remember and forget the same images as adults. We recommend teachers and caregivers utilize the ResMem deep neural network to select memorable images to be used in educational settings.