Bizarreness Effect (Why do we remember bizarre things more easily?)
The Bizarreness Effect, a brief explanation
What is the Bizarreness Effect?
The bizarreness effect is tendency to remember things that we consider to be bizarre more easily than things that aren’t bizarre.
Example
Whilst walking on the way to work in the early morning you pass a group of people returning home from a night out. For the rest of the day you remember that one of the was dressed as a giant traffic cone.
The literature
Geraci, L., McDaniel, M. A., Miller, T. M. & Hughes, M. L. (2013). The bizarreness effect: evidence for the critical influence of retrieval processes. Memory & Cognition, 41, 1228-1237. Doi: 10.3758/s13421-013-0335-4
Kline, S. & Groninger, L. D. (2013). The imagery bizarreness effect as a function of sentence complexity and presentation time. Bulleting of the Psychonomic Society, 29, 25-27. Doi: 10.3758/BF03334758
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