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Recent work has begun to evaluate the memorability of everyday visual symbols as a new way to understand how abstract concepts are processed in memory. Symbols were previously found to be highly memorable, especially relative to words, but it remained unclear what was driving memorability. Here, we bridged this gap by exploring the visual and conceptual attributes driving the high memorability observed for symbols. Participants were tested on their memory for conventional symbols (e.g., !@#$%) before sorting them based on visual or conceptual features. Principal component analyses performed on the sorting data then revealed which of these features predict symbol memorability. An artificial image generator was then used to form novel symbols while accentuating or downplaying predictive features to create a set of memorable and forgettable symbols, respectively. Both recognition and cued-recall memory performance were substantially improved for symbols that were designed to be memorable. This work suggests that specific visual attributes drive image memorability and offers initial evidence that memorability can be engineered.
