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Related Experiment Videos

The bizarreness effect: dissociation between item and source memory.

Christopher B Macklin1, Mark A McDaniel

  • 1Department of Psychology, Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH 44074, USA. cmacklin@oberlin.edu

Memory (Hove, England)
|September 30, 2005
PubMed
Summary

Bizarre sentences improve item recall but not spatial memory. This finding challenges existing memory theories and suggests a new integration approach for understanding memory encoding and retrieval.

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Memory Research
  • Human Memory

Background:

  • Bizarre stimuli are often better remembered than common stimuli.
  • Existing memory models do not fully explain the relationship between item memory and source memory.
  • The role of expectation violation in memory encoding requires further investigation.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the effect of sentence bizarreness on item recall and spatial source memory.
  • To examine the relationship between item memory and source memory for bizarre and common sentences.
  • To propose a theoretical framework integrating findings on item and source memory.

Main Methods:

  • Participants learned nouns embedded in either bizarre or common sentences.
  • Recall of the nouns (item memory) and their spatial locations (source memory) were tested.

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  • Statistical analyses were used to compare memory performance across conditions.

    • Main Results:

    • Nouns in bizarre sentences were recalled better than those in common sentences.
    • Memory for spatial location did not differ significantly between bizarre and common sentence conditions.
    • The bizarreness effect on item memory did not extend to source memory.

    Conclusions:

    • The dissociation between item and source memory for bizarre stimuli challenges current theoretical models.
    • A new theoretical perspective is needed to account for the differential effects of bizarreness on item versus source memory.
    • The expectation-violation hypothesis was not supported by the current findings regarding item-context memory relationships.