A study by neuroscientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) reveals thatthe most memorable photos for humans are those that include people, followed by interior scenes and details of human-scale objects. The landscapes, however, although they are beautiful and transmit calm, are, in most cases, easy to forget.
The study, which will be presented next June at theIEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, is the first to analyze in depth what makes a photograph unforgettable. The authors, coordinated by Aude Oliva, worked with 10,000 images of all kinds showing them to a series of subjects and repeating them to see which they identified as duplicates and, therefore, remembered better. In this way they verified that theimages with peoplethey were the ones that were best retained in memory. Indoor spaces, such as a grocery store, andknown objects portrayed in the foregroundthey were also especially memorable.
Based on the results, Oliva and his team developed acomputer algorithm that scores images based on how unforgettable they are to a human being. This algorithm, they say, could be used by graphic designers, by book and magazine publishers when choosing a cover, or by anyone who wants to share some photos of their vacations on Facebook or Flickr. You could evenincorporate the algorithm to cameras or smart mobile phones such as the iPhone, in the form of an app, to tell the photographer if an image will be memorable (and how much) right after taking it.
