Have you ever struggled to remember the name of someone you just met? A recent study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition suggests that the natural stickiness of a person’s face plays a key role in whether you will recall their name. The findings indicate that highly memorable faces help people remember associated names, but this memory-boosting effect does not happen when names are paired with memorable photographs of places.

For decades, scientists studying human memory have focused on how the mental effort we spend processing a fact determines how well we will retain it. However, memory also depends on natural qualities belonging to the object or event itself. Some items possess an intrinsic memorability, meaning they tend to be consistently remembered better by different people regardless of how much effort is put into learning them.

“I was fascinated by the idea that some things in our environment are naturally more memorable than others, meaning most people will remember or forget the same images regardless of their individual memory skills,” explained Andrew Cook, a visiting assistant professor of psychology at Hamilton College. Cook and his colleagues designed a series of experiments to test whether seeing a memorable image would provide evidence for enhanced recall of an associated name. “We wanted to know if memorability is ‘sticky,’” Cook said.