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 […]
Monthly Archives: March 2014
Von Restorff effect
The Von Restorff effect (named after psychiatrist and children’s paediatrician Hedwig von Restorff 1906–1962), also called the isolation effect, predicts that an item that “stands out like a sore thumb” (called distinctive encoding) is more likely to be remembered than other items. A bias in favour of remembering the unusual. Modern theory of the isolation […]
Tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon
The tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon (TOT), sometimes called presque vu, is the failure to retrieve a word from memory, combined with partial recall and the feeling that retrieval is imminent. The phenomenon’s name comes from the saying, “It’s on the tip of my tongue.” The tip of the tongue phenomenon reveals that lexical access occurs in stages. People in […]
Testing effect
The testing effect is a psychological phenomenon that refers to an enhancement in the long-term retention of information as a result of taking a memory test. However, in order for this effect to be demonstrated the test trials must have a medium to high retrieval success. Logically if the test trials are so difficult that […]
Telescoping effect
In cognitive psychology, the telescoping effect (or telescoping bias) refers to the temporal displacement of an event whereby people perceive recent events as being more remote than they are and distant events as being more recent than they are. The former is known as backward telescoping or time expansion, and the latter as is known as […]
Suggestibility
Suggestibility is the quality of being inclined to accept and act on the suggestions of others. A person experiencing intense emotions tends to be more receptive to ideas and therefore more suggestible. Generally, suggestibility decreases as age increases. However, psychologists have found that individual levels of self-esteem and assertiveness can make some people more suggestible […]
Illusory truth effect
The truth effect, the illusory truth effect or the illusion-of-truth effect is the tendency to believe information to be correct because we are exposed to it more times.
Belief bias
Belief bias is the tendency to judge the strength of arguments based on the plausibility of their conclusion rather than how strongly they support that conclusion.
Bias blind spot
The bias blind spot is the cognitive bias of failing to compensate for one’s own cognitive biases. The term was created by Emily Pronin, a social psychologist from Princeton University’s Department of Psychology, with colleagues Daniel Lin and Lee Ross. The bias blind spot is named after the visual blind spot. Pronin and her co-authors explained […]
Choice-supportive bias
In cognitive science, choice-supportive bias is the tendency to retroactively ascribe positive attributes to an option one has selected. It is a cognitive bias. For example, if a person buys a computer from Apple instead of a computer running Windows, he is likely to ignore or downplay the faults of Apple computers while amplifying those […]