It was shown several decades ago that people can remember more than 2,000 pictures with at least 90% accuracy in recognition tests over a period of several days, even with short presentation times during learning ( 1). Humans have a remarkable ability to remember pictures. Thus, superior overall memory for pictures may be mediated by more effective and automatic engagement of areas important for visual memory, including medial temporal cortex, whereas the mechanisms underlying specific encoding strategies appear to operate similarly on pictures and words. Each encoding strategy was characterized by a distinctive activity pattern, but these patterns were largely the same for pictures and words.
Encoding of pictures resulted in greater activity of bilateral visual and medial temporal cortices, compared with encoding words, whereas encoding of words was associated with increased activity in prefrontal and temporoparietal regions related to language function. Encoding was carried out by using three different strategies to explore possible interactions between material specificity and types of processing. To do this, we used positron emission tomography to map the brain regions active during encoding of words and pictures of objects. We examined the neural correlates of memory for pictures and words in the context of episodic memory encoding to determine material-specific differences in brain activity patterns. A striking characteristic of human memory is that pictures are remembered better than words.
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