Establishing a Database for Studying Human Face Photograph Memory

Establishing a Database for Studying Human Face Photograph Memory Wilma Alice Bainbridge* (wilma@mit.edu) Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT, 77 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02139 USA Phillip Isola* (phillipi@mit.edu) Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT, 77 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02139 USA Idan Blank (iblank@mit.edu) Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT, 77 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02139 USA Aude Oliva (oliva@csail.mit.edu) Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), MIT, 77 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02139 USA Abstract Introduction Contemporary visual environments bombard us with hundreds of face images every day, and this places a non- trivial demand on long-term memory. However, little is known about what makes certain faces remain in our memories, while others are quickly forgotten. To establish a basis for face memorability exploration, we assembled a database of 8,690 face photographs from online sources, spanning diverse face and image characteristics. Workers on Amazon's Mechanical Turk were asked to identify repetitions within a stream of these stimuli. Variations in image memorability (hit rates, false alarm rates, and their interactions) were reliable across participants, suggesting that face images may have different intrinsic levels of memorability. We discuss future directions in using this database to quantify face photograph memorability, as well as potential scientific and commercial applications. Every day, we encounter an overwhelming number of photographs and images of people's faces. Many inter- personal interactions are mediated by such images: we view people's Facebook profile pictures; memorize photographs of our students; browse personals on dating websites; skim through pictures attached to job applications; and encounter countless face images published on advertisements on billboards, in magazines, and online. As social creatures, we remember many of these faces. Large-scale visual memory experiments have shown that people have a remarkable ability to remember which specific image they saw even after seeing thousands of pictures depicting objects, scenes or events (Konkle, Brady, Alvarez, & Oliva, 2010a; Standing, 1973). Importantly, these studies have shown that we do not just remember the gist of a picture, but we are able to recognize which precise image we saw and some of its visual details (Brady, Konkle, Alvarez, & Oliva, 2008; Konkle, Brady, Alvarez, & Oliva, 2010b). In addition to remembering particular images as icons, we also have the intuition that not all images are remembered equally. While the reasons why some images are remembered are varied, recent works have found that Keywords: face recognition; image memorability; face photograph memory database Figure 1: An example set of 196 random images from the face photo database used for this study.

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