Larger Than Life: Does an Object’s Size Affect Someone’s Ability to Remember It?

To what extent does our memory store sensory details, such as size, shape, color, etc.? In a recent article, “Canonical and Retinal Size in Visual Working Memory,” William Gronewald, undergraduate student, Vanessa Lee, faculty, and Roger Remington, adjunct faculty, sought to answer that question, examining how the size of an object affects a person’s Visual Working Memory (VWM).

The researchers defined two types of image size: retinal size, meaning the size of an object on the screen, and canonical size, referring to an object’s typical size in the real world. Interestingly, objects with a larger retinal size were easier to remember, while objects with a smaller canonical size also yielded better memory. However, the researchers found that across-the-board, bigger pictures were easier to remember when mixed with smaller ones. The third experiment involved participants remembering colored squares that were displayed in different sizes on the screen. In this case, neither large nor small squares were easier to remember when all the squares were sized similarly, but when the squares were in mixed-size groups, participants found it easier to recall the color of the bigger squares rather than the smaller ones.

Gronewald and colleagues concluded that objects that stimulated more neurons were favored by the VWM, something that was particularly relevant in mixed-size groups. Results such as these can have real-world applications; e.g., a billboard might be more memorable, and therefore effective, if it uses larger images.