The Von Restorff effect, also called the isolation effect, is the finding that an item that stands out from surrounding, similar items is more likely to be remembered than the other items. It is named for the German psychiatrist and pediatrician Hedwig von Restorff, who first documented the effect experimentally in 1933 while working in Wolfgang Kohler's laboratory, presenting participants with lists in which one item differed distinctively from the rest. The effect is commonly explained by the greater relative attention and distinctive encoding an isolated item receives compared with items that resemble their neighbors, and it has practical applications in areas such as advertising and interface design, where distinctiveness is used deliberately to improve recall.
Facts
Core ClaimWhen a list contains one item that differs from the rest, that distinctive item is remembered better than the surrounding uniform items. 1 First Described Year Classification
Type of Phenomenon Connections
Sources
1. Wikipedia: Von Restorff Effect
Wikimedia FoundationWikipedia lead section, sentence 1
The von Restorff effect, also known as the isolation effect, predicts that when multiple homogeneous stimuli are presented, the stimulus that differs from the rest is more likely to be remembered.
Wikipedia lead section, sentence 2
who, in her 1933 study, found that when participants were presented with a list of categorically similar items with one distinctive, isolated item on the list, memory for the item was improved.
lead section, phenomenon-kind classification
The von Restorff effect, also known as the isolation effect, predicts that when multiple homogeneous stimuli are presented, the stimulus that differs from the rest is more likely to be remembered.
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