Study Finds People Are What Make Photos Memorable

Researchers at MIT spent some time researching just what made a photo memorable in the eyes of the viewer. It's not an amazing scene or a beautiful sunset, and it's not intense action or even perfect framing.

The answer, as it turns out, is people. When a person is in a picture, that picture is far more likely to be remembered than when a picture is without a human subject. MIT grad student Phillip Isola is quick to point out that more memorable doesn't necessarily mean better though. "Pleasantness and memorability are not the same," he says.

"There has been a lot of work in trying to understand what makes an image interesting, or appealing, or what makes people like a particular image. But all of those questions are really hard to answer," says Carnengie Mellon professor Alexi Efros. "What [the MIT researchers] did was basically approach the problem from a very scientific point of view and say that one thing we can measure is memorability."

(via PhysOrg)