Unforgettable Lessons from Forgettable Images: Intra-Class Memorability Matters in Computer Vision Tasks

We introduce intra-class memorability, where certain images within the same class are more memorable than others despite shared category characteristics. To investigate what features make one object instance more memorable than others, we design and conduct human behavior experiments, where participants are shown a series of images one at a time, and they must identify when the current item matches the item presented a few steps back in the sequence. To quantify memorability, we propose the Intra-Class Memorability score (ICMscore), a novel metric that incorporates the temporal intervals between repeated image presentations into its calculation. Our contributions open new pathways in understanding intra-class memorability by scrutinizing fine-grained visual features that result in the least and most memorable images and laying the groundwork for real-world applications in cognitive science and computer vision.