Reout dayan^1, (), Olga kreichman^2,, Sharon Gilaie-Dotan³; ¹School of Optometry and Vision Science, Faculty of Life Science, Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel, ²The Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center, Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel

Studies have shown that people can remember thousands of images with remarkable detail when they are deeply engaged in encoding these images (e.g., Brady et al. 2008). However, it remains unclear whether this reflects everyday memory when people are typically not highly engaged in encoding the images they come across. Across a series of comprehensive experiments (n=339), we recently found that under much less engaging conditions, memory for object images (taken from Brady et al. 2008) is affected by the number of encoded images and by the number of interfering images at test. Since when people have rich representation of objects they are able to successfully distinguish between them and other similar items (e.g., finding their luggage on the conveyor belt at the airport), here we further tested memory strength by examining whether it would be affected by the similarity of the distractors at test. Here too, memory (n=62) was significantly affected by the number of encoded images and by the number of distractors at test. Importantly, memory performance was affected by the similarity of the distractors (e.g., for 60 encoded images: 2AFC accuracy of 86% (similar distractors) vs 91% (non-similar distractors), for 180 encoded images: 6AFC accuracy of 41% (similar distractors) vs 55% (non-similar distractors)). While image memory capacity can reach its extensive potential during demanding encoding conditions, our results suggest that during less engaging conditions, image memory is not as strong and extensive as previously assumed.

Acknowledgements: This study was funded by ISF Individual Research Grants 1485/18 and 1462/23 to SGD, and by CHE Lev-Zion Schola rship to OK