  When we encounter a new person or place, we may easily encode it into our
memories, or we may quickly forget it. Recent work finds that this likelihood
of encoding a given entity - memorability - is highly consistent across viewers
and intrinsic to an image; people tend to remember and forget the same images.
However, several forces influence our memories beyond the memorability of the
stimulus itself - for example, how attention-grabbing the stimulus is, how much
attentional resources we dedicate to the task, or how primed we are for that
stimulus. How does memorability interact with these various phenomena, and
could any of them explain the effects of memorability found in prior work? This
study uses five psychophysical experiments to explore the link between
memorability and three attention-related phenomena: 1) bottom-up attention
(through testing spatial cueing and visual search), 2) top-down attention
(through testing cognitive control and depth of encoding), and 3) priming.
These experiments find that memorability remains resilient to all of these
phenomena - none are able to explain memorability effects or overcome the
strong effects memorability has on determining memory performance. Thus,
memorability is truly an independent, intrinsic attribute of an image that
works in conjunction with these phenomena to determine if an event will
ultimately be remembered.
