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Related Experiment Videos

The bizarreness effect: it's not surprising, it's complex

M A McDaniel1, G O Einstein, E L DeLosh

  • 1Department of Psychological Sciences, Purdue University, USA.

Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition
|March 1, 1995
PubMed
Summary

The bizarreness effect, where people better recall bizarre than common images, occurs because mixed lists enhance distinctiveness and order encoding. Surprise reactions do not significantly influence this memory recall phenomenon.

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Memory Studies
  • Experimental Psychology

Background:

  • The bizarreness effect describes superior recall for bizarre over common stimuli.
  • This effect is consistently observed when bizarreness is a within-subject variable (mixed lists).

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the underlying mechanisms of the bizarreness effect.
  • To test the role of expectation-violation theory and surprise reactions.
  • To explore the influence of list composition (mixed vs. unmixed) on memory recall.

Main Methods:

  • Five experiments were conducted using sentence recall tasks.
  • Bizarreness was manipulated as a within-subject variable (mixed lists).
  • Surprise reactions were augmented or attenuated in some experiments; order encoding was assessed.

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Main Results:

  • The occurrence of the bizarreness effect was determined by mixed lists, not just the quantity of bizarre items.
  • Manipulating surprise reactions had minimal impact on the bizarreness effect.
  • List mixing influenced the differential encoding of order information for bizarre and common items.

Conclusions:

  • A novel account of the bizarreness effect integrates distinctiveness and differential order information encoding.
  • Expectation-violation theory does not fully explain the bizarreness effect.
  • The way memory encodes item order is crucial for understanding enhanced recall of bizarre stimuli.