Future:Media:Change

If you want your content to be remembered, use color.  More specifically, use natural color.  So says an interesting psychological study I ran across today.

Study finds people would better recall the center image than the versions to the right and left.

In the study, normal-sighted subjects were shown 48 images of landscapes, flowers, rock formations and man-made objects–half of them in color, half in black and white.  Then 48 new pictures were added to the mix to see which original pictures the subjects could recall.  Finding: Subjects remembered the color version of an image better than the black-and-white version. Not too surprising.

Here’s the part that is: When versions of the images with altered colors were added into the mix — ones with green skies or red grass — those pictures weren’t remembered any better than the black-and-white versions.

One would think the unusual would make such an impression it’d be remembered for days or weeks to come.  Evidently not.  “If stimuli are too strange,” explained Karl Gegenfurtner, co-author of the study, “the [brain's] system simply doesn’t engage them as well.”  Gegenfurtner says this shows the brain’s visual memory is specifically set up for natural color schemes.

As fascinating as this is, it’s important to note that subjects weren’t viewing photos by Dorothea Lange, or Ansel Adams.  It’s hard to imagine anyone failing to recall those masters of black-and-white photography.

The study originally appeared in the May 2002 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, and was reported in Scientific American: Mind that same month. (I only ran across it this morning but thought you might have missed it then too.)

PHOTO CREDIT (original): John Collier, Library of Congress. Photo manipulation by Julie C. Roth.