ArticleJournal of experimental psychology. General2026
What makes memories vivid?
Article in Journal of experimental psychology. General, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Why are pictures remembered better than sounds? The roles of subjective vividness of mental imagery and semantic labels.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- Perceptual and conceptual influences on memory judgments.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- From Sensory Details to Verbal Codes: Visual Memory Reinstatement of Location and Color Features.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
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3 authors.
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Abstract
Some memories are vivid and detailed, while others are vague and indistinct. Although a common experience, the cognitive mechanisms underlying these differences remain poorly understood. A prevailing explanation for what makes mental representations vivid is their shared properties with visual perception. However, recent research has shown that semantic properties of stimuli strongly influence their representations. To determine the extent to which visual and/or semantic properties influence memory vividness, we first examined whether individual stimuli reliably elicit similar subjective feelings of vividness across different subjects. Next, we explored how vividness relates to visual (i.e., color and brightness) and semantic (i.e., taxonomic category) properties of naturalistic images (Experiment 1). We found that vividness ratings were consistent across subjects; crucially, this consistency depended not only on the visual properties of the stimuli but also on their semantic properties. Next, we used neural networks to model visual, visuo-semantic, and semantic stimulus representations, selecting stimuli according to their distinctiveness in each representational format (Experiment 2). Our results showed that stimuli selected for their semantic and visuo-semantic properties reliably elicited vivid memories. Finally, we demonstrated that even in a purely visual recall test (Experiment 3), where both encoding and retrieval operations focused exclusively on the visual properties of a mnemonic cue, memory vividness still depended on the integration of visual and semantic stimuli representations. Together, our findings demonstrate, at multiple levels of inference, the combined influence of perceptual and semantic properties in shaping the vividness of mental representations of past events. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.