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Cognitive Psychology: Attention · Decision making · Learning · Judgement · Memory · Motivation · Perception · Reasoning · Thinking - Cognitive processes Cognition - Outline Index
The Von Restorff effect (named after Hedwig von Restorff), also called the isolation effect, predicts that an item that "stands out like a sore thumb" (called distinctive encoding) will be more likely to be remembered than other items.
For instance, if you see a list of items on a shopping list, if one item is written in bright green and the others are not, you may be more likely to remember that one item.
This distinctiveness may come in the form of humor, in which case the humor effect is incurred. Similarly, specific examples may also include the bizarreness effect and the serial position effect.
References
- Von Restorff, H. (1933). Über die Wirkung von Bereichsbildungen im Spurenfeld (The effects of field formation in the trace field). Psychologie Forschung, 18, 299-34.