Bizarreness Effect

The bizarreness effect is the proposed tendency for unusual or bizarre material to be remembered better than common, ordinary material, though the research literature on the effect is mixed and it is not observed in every experimental context; it tends to appear specifically when a set of to-be-remembered items varies in how bizarre the items are, rather than when every item is equally unusual. The psychologists Mark McDaniel and Gilles Einstein questioned the intuitive explanation for the effect in a 1986 study, arguing that bizarreness itself does not directly strengthen memory; instead, they proposed that bizarre material tends to be more distinctive relative to the rest of a set, and that this relative distinctiveness, rather than bizarreness as such, is what better supports encoding and later recall.