Online Poker vs Live Poker and Memory

I've always had this thing playing online poker. This inability to really associate reads / tells / remember history with players online simply based on their alias. I'm sure part of this is that I just never really focus on their name to the point where it sticks in my brain and I associate certain lines/hands with the alias.

During the session itself I have no problem relating action across tables to the same person, but once that session is over and a few days later sitting down again, I've lost that memory.

This isn't THAT surprising to me, because over the last several years my memory has been pretty bad on most things in general.

But this is only really dawning on me now, after playing more and more live. Live play - I remember EVERYTHING. I remember hands vs certain ppl from months ago, because I can associate the hand with the person, wiht their face etc. I might not remember their name (which in my live poker games - the electronic version - shows up on the screen), but I do remember their face.

So why am I remembering things so much better live than online?
-Am I drowning out my online memory by focusing too much on my HUD/stats?
-Am I just not correlating strong enough associations with their poker alias online to their play style etc? (ie: I'm more of a visual person?)
-I'm 6-8 tabling online, so there is just less attention being paid overall to any given table and any given player?
-Live - I see the person for hours. There's less hands, so it's easy to remember the memorable ones and associate it to a person?
-Live - ppl are so uncreative that any interesting hand stands out so much?

I'm not really sure what the reasons are. Does anyone else experience this? Any advice on strengthening online player style to alias association? Can you create avatars for ppl on stars? Maybe this visual queue would help me? Hard to say.