Von Restorff effect

nationality

German

occupation / innovator as

psychologist

is the tendency of an item that 'stands out like a sore thumb' to be more likely remembered than other items.

The Von Restorff effect also called the isolation effect, predicts that an item that 'stands out like a sore thumb' (called distinctive encoding) is more likely remembered than other items. A bias in favour of remembering the unusual.

is the tendency to remember unusual items better than the more common items.

von RESTORFF EFFECT. The German psychologist/physician Hedwig von Restorff ( 1903') developed the generalization that if in a given series of stimuli to be learned (such as a list of words), one of them is made physically distinctive in some way (e.g., printed in large type or in a different color from the others), it will be easier to learn and recall. This phenomenon, called the von Restorff effect, is also known as the isolation effect (Jensen, 1962... Reber, 1995) and the Kohler-Restorff phenomenon (Zusne, 1987) and refers to the tendency to remember unusual items better than the more common items (von Restorff, 1933). The experiments by von Restorff ( 1933) and Kohler and von Restorff ( 1935) provided a trace theory basis for the Gestalt psychologist to explain the forgetting of material. A trace regarding learned materials could become distorted through its interactions with a mass of related traces similar to il. Thus, associati ve interference in forgetting experiments was related to the material to be remembered. Von Restorff (1933) showed that part of the difficulty of learning a list of nonsense syllables stems from their homogeneity: they are all undistinguishable and equally confusable with one another. However, if one item is perceptually distinguishable, then that unique item will be remembered better than the other items. Kohler and von Restorff (1935) thought of the unique item as standing out like a figure against a ground of all the homogeneous items. Being thus distinguished, the trace laid down for the unique item would be isolated from the traces of the rest of the items and therefore not be distorted by interactions with those traces. Accounts of the von Restorff effect by stimulus-response associationist have proceeded along similar lines, using principles of stimulus generalization and associative interference (Bower & Hilgard, 1981).

Hedwig von RestorffThinkers

Hedwig von Restorff