Memorability under pressure: Memorable images are not resilient to retrieval deadlines

Image memorability denotes the consistent tendency for some images to be better remembered than others. Although often attributed to enhanced encoding and storage, we investigated whether high-memorability images are also retrieved more efficiently. To that end, three experiments introduced time pressure in retrieval by imposing strict response deadlines in old-new (Experiments 1 and 2) and two-alternative forced-choice (Experiment 3) recognition tests. We contrasted two competing hypotheses: the resilience hypothesis, which predicts that the retrieval of high-memorability images is robust enough to withstand retrieval challenges, and a resource-dependent account, which suggests that any retrieval advantage depends on available resources. The results showed that high-memorability images were better remembered than low-memorability images in all conditions. Yet contrary to the resilience hypothesis, high-memorability images were not more resilient to time constraints. Instead, their performance significantly diminished under limited deadlines, similar to that for low-memorability images, consistent with a resource-dependent account. We conclude that the benefits of memorability likely operate as a multistage cascade. Although high-memorability images may benefit from an initial processing head start, this early fluency provides no unique resilience against temporal truncation, leaving their retrieval efficiency resource-dependent. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).