Independent Effects of Valence and Memorability in Visual Statistical Learning

Previous research showed that negative valence images benefit memory tasks as well as visual statistical learning (VSL) tasks. Recent studies stressed another factor that strongly drives memory performance: Image memorability - an inherent property of the image regarding its likelihood to be remembered across observers. Here, we examined the influence of image memorability and emotional valence on VSL and the potential role of memorability explaining the benefit of negative valence in VSL tasks. In three VSL experiments, participants viewed a stream of repeating triplets of images. Importantly, the triplets were constructed of varying images in their emotional valence and memorability scores. We found that memorability significantly influenced VSL performance, with high-memorability images enhancing VSL compared to low-memorability images. The results also replicated the negative valence benefit, showing better VSL for negative valence images, but only under low-memorability conditions. The results demonstrate that memorability plays an important role in VSL, but it cannot fully account for the benefit seen with negative emotion in VSL tasks. Moreover, our findings support the beneficial impact of negative valence on VSL but also raise questions about its robustness. Taken together, our study provides a novel and significant insight into the role of image memorability in incidental visual memory and highlights the importance of considering memorability when testing the effect of emotional valence on learning and memory.