Larger images are better remembered during naturalistic encoding

Abstract

Significance It is unclear what makes some of the numerous visual scenes we encounter every day memorable (while others are not) when we make no intentional effort to memorize them. Here, we reasoned that although visual perception is somewhat size invariant (e.g., we can recognize a person from multiple distances), visual memory would depend on image size. Across experiments, where participants freely viewed images without any memory- or nonmemory-related task (similar to naturalistic visual behavior), larger images were remembered better than smaller ones (about 1.5 times better), and this effect was proportional to image size. Our study indicates that physical stimulus dimensions (as the size of an image) influence memory, and this may have significant implications to learning, aging, development, etc.