Previously, in Gray Matter, we tried to justify what can make us remember a certain melody for a long time, and we concluded that certain musical compositions seem to fit into the functional structure of neurons like a key in its lock. The question now is whether there is something equivalent in a pictorial work, that is, whether paintings that are commonly memorable have some universal characteristic that justifies it.
It is true that what is memorable for one person may not be memorable for another, hence many times the justification is idiosyncratic, that is, each person, or each human group, may be impacted by a certain painting for reasons related to their own cultural history. or to its particular relationship with that painting or its contents. Likewise, when a work is in the memory of many, such as Las Meninas by Velázquez, The Gioconda by Leonardo da Vinci or The Sunflowerss of Van Gogh, appeal is usually made to its author, its beauty or its emotional attributes, that is, to the personal and subjective experiences of the viewer in relation to that work. But is there something intrinsic in each universal work that goes beyond the purely idiosyncratic?
To investigate this, Trent Davis, a specialist in neuroscience and visual arts, and psychologist Wilma Bainbridge, both from the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago (USA), carried out three complementary experiments, involving 4,021 paintings from the Art Institute of Chicago. In the first of these experiments, 3,216 participants viewed on-line successive images of those paintings and had to press a key each time they recognized having seen the same image earlier in the sequence. In the second, 19 new participants freely explored the Art Institute in person and then tested their memory for a series of paintings using their mobile phone. In the third experiment, again on-lineanother 49 new participants gave their assessment of abstract attributes such as beauty, emotion, interest and familiarity of each painting viewed.
The result, published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences from New Yorkshowed a significant coincidence in the memories expressed by the participants, both in the sessions on-line as in the in-person ones, which led the authors to consider that each piece may have its own intrinsic “memorability”, based solely on its visual properties, which can be predictive of the memory of the visitors who contemplate it. The authors also used an artificial intelligence resource, the ResMem program, to estimate the memorability of each work, and were surprised to see that this program also significantly predicted it, both on-line as in person, based solely on the perceptual characteristics of the image, independently, therefore, of high-level cognitive attributes such as its beauty, emotion, aesthetics, content or particular interest. Artificial intelligence, the authors claim, can programmatically predict the fame of a work, despite not including any cultural or historical knowledge about it. This knowledge, they say, can be very useful for museum and art center administrators in general.
ResMem, when predicting the possibility that a work will be remembered based on its visual perceptual characteristics, does not tell us what those precise characteristics are, which must therefore continue to be investigated, but it is still something equivalent to the so-called detector. of lies, which, in reality, when based on the emotional and generic physiological response of the subject investigated, tells us that he is lying, without specifying the content of his lies that we must deduce from the questions asked. In any case, a program like ResMem can help us know, for example, if the wonderful copy of the Gioconda that was found some time ago in the warehouses of the Prado Museum in Madrid and is now exhibited there, whether or not it has the same memorability as the original piece exhibited in the Louvre Museum in Paris, which could help us reveal the mystery of whether its author was also the great master of the Italian Renaissance.
Gray matter It is a space that tries to explain, in an accessible way, how the brain creates the mind and controls behavior. The senses, motivations and feelings, sleep, learning and memory, language and consciousness, as well as their main disorders, will be analyzed in the conviction that knowing how they work is equivalent to knowing ourselves better and increasing our well-being and relationships with other people.
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