Visual memory for naturalistic scenes is mediated by: amount of exposure, semantic content, and type of encoding. These factors might interactively contribute to scene memorability. Thus, we tracked computer-mouse movements during an encoding phase where participants verified the congruency of sentence and scene pairs, which varied in plausibility. The presentation time of the scenes was also manipulated. Subsequently, in an unexpected recognition phase, participants had to indicate whether they remembered scenes (old and new). Recognition improved when correct verifications were made during encoding especially: when the scene was implausible, the stimuli pair congruent, and for longer presentation times. When comparing the trajectories between encoding and recognition, we found greater hesitancy during encoding, especially for implausible scenes in incongruent pairs, decreasing as presentation time increased. These results provide novel insights into the factors modulating the memorability of naturalistic scenes.

Our visual system tends to prioritise novel information, and this allocation of attention, as examined with the Visual Paired Comparison Task (VPC), is taken as an indirect index of memory processes. At present, research on the emergence of a novelty preference (NP) remains unclear about its temporal dynamics and agnostic about the role that the organisation of conceptual knowledge may play in it. These two gaps are addressed in this eye-tracking study, which adapts the VPC task to enable a finer temporal tracking of the NP while manipulating categorical and functional relationships between pairs of real-world visual objects to examine the impact conceptual associations bear on it. We found that NP significantly increases with increasing delay between the familiarisation and the test phase, especially for pairs of objects that were both categorically and functionally related (e.g., dart/dartboard). Our findings provide fresh evidence about the interplay between overt attention, conceptual knowledge and memory processes on novelty preference while offering valuable insights into the temporal dynamics of NP and its conceptual implications for mechanisms governing visual short-term memory.