Schedule of Events | Symposia

Rethinking Vividness: Semantic moreso than perceptual features drive the recall vividness of complex pictures

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 5:00 – 7:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Ricardo Morales-Torres¹ (ricardo.morales.torres@duke.edu), Simon W. Davis¹, Roberto Cabeza¹; ¹Duke University

Humans have an astonishing capacity to generate mental images about past events. Moreover, people can easily report whether what appears in their "mind's eye” is clear and detailed or vague and sketchy. Although this is a ubiquitous experience, the cognitive mechanisms underlying these differences are not well understood. To investigate this issue, in Experiment 1, we examined how the subjective feeling of memory vividness relates to the perceptual (i.e., color and brightness) and semantic (i.e., the category of a stimulus) properties of naturalistic images. Surprisingly, our findings showed that while perceptual properties moderately contribute to the vividness of visual memories, the primary drivers of memory vividness are semantic properties. To further test this finding, in Experiment 2, we employed several Deep Neural Networks to construct representational spaces (geometric planes where similar stimuli are closer together) for our stimuli based on their perceptual or semantic features. Our results showed that semantic, but not perceptual, representations drive vividness ratings: more semantically distinctive stimuli were more vividly recalled. Our results shed light, at multiple levels of inference, on the influence of semantic properties in driving the vividness of mental representations of past events. These findings suggest that a vivid mental experience is shaped by what we know about the world, not just by how the world looks to us.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic