{"id":2661,"date":"2017-04-20T08:52:06","date_gmt":"2017-04-20T12:52:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/?p=2661"},"modified":"2017-09-06T13:51:26","modified_gmt":"2017-09-06T17:51:26","slug":"45ds678giqrwfdg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/2017\/04\/20\/45ds678giqrwfdg\/","title":{"rendered":"You will remember this post. Why? Because it is weird!"},"content":{"rendered":"
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http:\/\/izismile.com<\/p><\/div>\n

Did you notice that you are actually very good at remembering weird things? You may not remember every single person who walks a dog on your way home because it’s just normal. However, if you see a dog walking a dog, you are very unlikely to forget the dogs. Why? Because they are weird! As you may expect, research supports that people do remember “weird” things better than normal things.<\/p>\n

Von Restorff (1933) demonstrated that people are more likely to remember a distinctive item in a list of homogeneous items than in a list of heterogeneous items (e.g., an orange in a bunch of bananas vs. an orange in a bunch of different fruit). This is called the Von Restorff effect or the isolation effect.<\/p>\n

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In reality, the isolation effect is common in our daily life. For example, you are more likely to remember the yellow bottle in a set of purple bottles due to its distinctive color. People can easily achieve a physical isolation effect by manipulating color, size, and spacing of the items (e.g., Cimbalo, Capria, Neider, & Wilkins, 1977). Gumenik & Levitt (1968) also found that the effect is stronger when the contrast between the isolated item and the background is larger.<\/p>\n

In addition to physical distinctiveness, semantic distinctiveness can also produce the isolation effect. Semantic isolation requires people to interpret the meaning of the isolated item. A classic way to study physical and semantic isolations in a lab experiment:<\/p>\n

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  1. Researchers present word lists that consist of about ten homogeneous words and one distinctive word<\/strong> to the participants.<\/li>\n
  2. Then they ask them to report whatever they remember from the lists and check whether\u00a0participants remember the distinctive word better.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Physical isolation can be created by making the isolation word’s color\/font different from other words(e.g. sky, blue, sun<\/strong>, car, bird, etc.), and semantic isolation can be created by inserting an isolation word that doesn’t belong to the same category that other words belong to (e.g., black, green, yellow, car, blue, etc.).<\/p>\n

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    https:\/\/dribbble.com<\/p><\/div>\n

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    So, what does the isolation effect require? Early explanations proposed that people remembered the distinctive item better because they paid more attention to it when they saw it (e.g., Jenkins\u00a0& Postman, 1948). The amount of attention paid during\u00a0a certain task determines whether the task is more automatic or more controlled. Automatic processes don’t need attention while controlled processes need attention. For instance, breathing is usually automatic, while learning how to dance is usually controlled because you really need to pay attention to follow up the motions.\u00a0Therefore, how attention can affect people’s performance on certain tasks depends on what processes (i.e. automatic or controlled) the task involves.<\/p>\n

    Bireta and Mazzei (2015) propose that we process other things’ physical characteristics in automatic processes and their semantic characteristics in controlled processes. For example,\u00a0we don’t need to pay attention to notice a\u00a0red word in a bunch black words, \u00a0but we need to pay attention to understand which category that word belongs to.<\/p>\n

    Then they performed an experiment to examine whether physical and semantic isolation effects require attention. Participants were shown with lists of words and completed memory tests on those words. The word lists are consist of eleven homogeneous words and a distinctive word. There were two types of lists: a list that contains a word that doesn’t belong to the category of other words in the list (semantic isolation) and a list that contains a word of a different color (physical isolation). When studying the words, half of the participants fully focused on the words while another half of participants were distracted by another task. The performances on memory tests showed that both focusing participants and distracted participants memorized the word of different color better than other normal words in the list. However, only focusing participants memorized the out-of-category word better than other words in the list. Distracted participants didn’t show any difference in memory of distinctive word and other words. In short, when people are distracted, they do notice physical distinctiveness, such as color and font, but they don’t notice semantic distinctiveness, such as differences in categories.\u00a0(To read the original paper, click here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

    For example, when we glance at a list of bird species written on the wall without paying attention to it, we won’t notice if there is a dinosaur species inside. However, if one word in the sentence is written in red while all other words are in black, we are more likely to remember the word even if we aren’t really paying attention.<\/p>\n

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    I wrote it in Keynote.<\/p><\/div>\n

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    The isolation effect is widely applied in marketing and political campaigns. Businesses and politicians love to use it to make you remember them better. After learning about the effect, we can see various advertisements with a more critical view.<\/p>\n