What Visual Attributes Make Mascot Characters Memorable? A Case Study on “Yuru-Charas”

Yuru-charas are mascot characters created to promote local tourism or organizations, which have been developed especially in Japan. The visual design of each yuru-chara can be an important feature influencing its popularity. This paper investigates the visual attributes that make mascot characters memorable. Specifically, we conducted a Visual Memory Game, which evaluates whether participants could have short-term memory of a target yuru-chara. The experiment showed that memorability scores of yuru-charas were different from one another. We manually assigned visual attributes to each yuru-chara image and then applied Wilcoxon rank sum test to analyze the attributes that contribute to making a yuru-chara image memorable. The result implied that memorability scores of yuru-charas whose designs are relatively simple were statistically significant than visually complex yuru-charas.