What moves us?: The intrinsic memorability of dance

Actions speak loudly, and our ability to remember and keep track of how other people move is fundamental to our interactions with them. But people move in incredibly complex, varied, and expressive ways, and we can’t remember all this information. Here we explore whether and how we prioritize some movements over others. With static images, previous work has found remarkable consistency in which images are remembered or forgotten across people — and this measure of how likely an image is to be remembered consistently is called its ‘memorability’. We know little, however, about how such a property of ‘memorability’ might influence our more dynamic experiences. Using the test case of a rich and abstract series of actions from dance, we discover memorability as an intrinsic attribute of movement. Across genres, some movements were consistently remembered, regardless of the perceiver. Such memorability was independent of static visual information and was additive (where memorability of constituent moments ultimately contributed to the memorability of the longer sequences). Amongst a comprehensive set of movement and aesthetic attributes, consistency in which movements people remembered was most predicted by subjective memorability, and importantly by both subjective (observer ratings) and objective (optical flow analysis) measures of the scale of motion, such that the less overall motion in a dance segment, the more memorable the movements tended to be. Thus, the dynamic segments that were most memorable were those that effectively created static snapshots for the mind.