Bizarreness effect is the tendency of bizarre material to be better remembered than common material. The scientific evidence for its existence is contended. Some research suggest it does exist, some suggests it doesn’t exist and some suggest it leads to worse remembering.

McDaniel and Einstein argues that bizarreness intrinsically does not enhance memory in their paper from 1986. They claim that bizarre information becomes distinctive. It is the distinctiveness that according to them makes encoding easier.