Does your brain remember certain experiences amidst the flood of information?
According to research, it may depend on how the brain is supposed to work.
To find out, researchers at Yale University learned memorable visual information “by pairing computational modeling of the complexity of the scene with behavioral learning.”
The results, published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, show that the brain does not remember predictable events.
“The mind prefers to remember things that cannot be explained at all,” said Ilker Yildyrim, a professor of psychology at Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
“If a scene is predictable and unsurprising, it will be ignored.”
The team designed a series of experiments in which people were asked to recall specific images from sequences of natural images presented in rapid succession.
They found that the more difficult the computational model was to reconstruct the image, the less likely the participants were to forget.
“We’re using AI models to understand human scenes — an understanding that could help AI develop more efficient memory systems in the future,” said John Lafferty, a Yale professor of statistics and data science.
