List of memory biases
Encyclopedia
In psychology
Psychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...

 and cognitive science
Cognitive science
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on how information is processed , represented, and transformed in behaviour, nervous system or machine...

, a memory bias is a cognitive bias
Cognitive bias
A cognitive bias is a pattern of deviation in judgment that occurs in particular situations. Implicit in the concept of a "pattern of deviation" is a standard of comparison; this may be the judgment of people outside those particular situations, or may be a set of independently verifiable...

 that either enhances or impairs the recall of a memory
Memory
In psychology, memory is an organism's ability to store, retain, and recall information and experiences. Traditional studies of memory began in the fields of philosophy, including techniques of artificially enhancing memory....

 (either the chances that the memory will be recalled at all, or the amount of time it takes for it to be recalled, or both), or that alters the content of a reported memory. There are many types of memory bias, including:
  • Choice-supportive bias
    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....

    : remembering chosen options as having been better than rejected options (Mather, Shafir & Johnson, 2000)
  • Change bias: after an investment of effort in producing change, remembering one's past performance as more difficult than it actually was
  • Childhood amnesia
    Childhood amnesia
    Childhood amnesia refers to the inability of adults to retrieve episodic memories before the age of 2-4 years, as well as the period before age 10 of which adults remember fewer memories than accounted for by the passage of time...

    : the retention of few memories from before the age of four
  • Consistency bias: incorrectly remembering one's past attitudes and behaviour as resembling present attitudes and behaviour.
  • Context effect
    Cue-dependent forgetting
    Cue-dependent forgetting, or retrieval failure, is the failure to recall a memory due to missing stimuli or cues that were present at the time the memory was encoded. It is one of five cognitive psychology theories of forgetting. It states that a memory is sometimes temporarily forgotten purely...

    : that cognition and memory are dependent on context, such that out-of-context memories are more difficult to retrieve than in-context memories (e.g., recall time and accuracy for a work-related memory will be lower at home, and vice versa)
  • Cross-race effect
    Cross-race effect
    Cross-race effect is the tendency for people of one race to have difficulty recognizing and processing faces and facial expressions of members of a race or ethnic group other than their own....

    : the tendency for people of one race to have difficulty identifying members of a race other than their own
  • Cryptomnesia
    Cryptomnesia
    Cryptomnesia occurs when a forgotten memory returns without it being recognised as such by the subject, who believes it is something new and original...

    : a form of misattribution where a memory is mistaken for imagination, because there is no subjective experience of it being a memory.
  • Egocentric bias
    Egocentric bias
    Egocentric bias occurs when people claim more responsibility for themselves for the results of a joint action than an outside observer would credit them....

    : recalling the past in a self-serving manner, e.g., remembering one's exam grades as being better than they were, or remembering a caught fish as bigger than it really was
  • Fading affect bias: a bias in which the emotion associated with unpleasant memories fades more quickly than the emotion associated with positive events.
  • Generation effect
    Generation effect
    The generation effect refers to the robust finding that information will be better remembered if it is generated rather than simply read. For example, you are more likely to remember the word "orangutan" if you generate it from the fragment "or_ng_ta_" than if you simply see the word in its...

     (Self-generation effect)
    : that self-generated information is remembered best. For instance, people are better able to recall memories of statements that they have generated than similar statements generated by others.
  • Google effect
    Google effect
    The Google effect is the tendency to forget information that can be easily found using Internet search engines such as Google, instead of remembering it.The phenomenon was described and named by Betsy Sparrow , Jenny Liu and Daniel M...

    : the tendency to forget information that can be easily found online.
  • Hindsight bias
    Hindsight bias
    Hindsight bias, or alternatively the knew-it-all-along effect and creeping determinism, is the inclination to see events that have already occurred as being more predictable than they were before they took place. It is a multifaceted phenomenon that can affect different stages of designs,...

    : the inclination to see past events as being predictable; also called the "I-knew-it-all-along" effect.
  • Humor effect: that humorous items are more easily remembered than non-humorous ones, which might be explained by the distinctiveness of humor, the increased cognitive processing time to understand the humor, or the emotional arousal caused by the humor.
  • Illusion-of-truth effect: that people are more likely to identify as true statements those they have previously heard (even if they cannot consciously remember having heard them), regardless of the actual validity of the statement. In other words, a person is more likely to believe a familiar statement than an unfamiliar one.
  • Lag effect: see spacing effect
    Spacing effect
    In psychology, the spacing effect refers to the fact that humans and animals more easily remember or learn items in a list when they are studied a few times over a long period of time , rather than studied repeatedly in a short period time .The phenomenon was first identified by Hermann Ebbinghaus;...

  • Leveling and Sharpening: memory distortions introduced by the loss of details in a recollection over time, often concurrent with sharpening or selective recollection of certain details that take on exaggerated significance in relation to the details or aspects of the experience lost through leveling. Both biases may be reinforced over time, and by repeated recollection or re-telling of a memory.
  • Levels-of-processing effect
    Levels-of-processing effect
    The levels-of-processing effect, identified by Fergus I. M. Craik and Robert S. Lockhart in 1972, describes memory recall of stimuli as a function of the depth of mental processing. Depth of processing falls on a shallow to deep continuum. Shallow processing leads to a fragile memory trace that...

    : that different methods of encoding information into memory have different levels of effectiveness (Craik & Lockhart, 1972).
  • List-length effect: a smaller percentage of items are remembered in a longer list, but as the length of the list increases, the absolute number of items remembered increases as well.
  • Misinformation effect
    Misinformation effect
    The misinformation effect refers to the finding that exposure to misleading information presented between the encoding of an event and its subsequent recall causes impairment in memory. This effect occurs when participants' recall of an event they witnessed is altered by introducing misleading...

    : that misinformation affects people's reports of their own memory.
  • Misattribution: when information is retained in memory but the source of the memory is forgotten. One of Schacter's (1999) Seven Sins of Memory, Misattribution was divided into Source Confusion, Cryptomnesia and False Recall/False Recognition.
  • Modality effect
    Modality effect
    The modality effect is a term used in experimental psychology, most often in the fields dealing with memory and learning, to refer to how learner performance depends on the presentation mode of studied items. Modality can refer to a number of characteristics of the presented study material...

    : that memory recall is higher for the last items of a list when the list items were received via speech than when they were received via writing.
  • Mood congruent memory bias: the improved recall of information congruent with one's current mood.
  • Next-in-line effect: that a person in a group has diminished recall for the words of others who spoke immediately before or after this person.
  • Osborn effect: that being intoxicated with a mind-altering substance makes it harder to retrieve motor patterns from the Basal Ganglion. (e.g., Shushaka, 1958).
  • Part-list cueing effect: that being shown some items from a list makes it harder to retrieve the other items (e.g., Slamecka, 1968).
  • Peak-end effect: that people seem to perceive not the sum of an experience but the average of how it was at its peak (e.g. pleasant or unpleasant) and how it ended.
  • Persistence: the unwanted recurrence of memories of a traumatic event
    Traumatic event
    A traumatic event is an event that is or may be a cause of trauma. The term may refer to one of the followiong:*Traumatic event , an event associated with a physical trauma...

    .
  • Picture superiority effect
    Picture superiority effect
    According to the picture superiority effect, concepts are much more likely to be remembered experientially if they are presented as pictures rather than as words....

    : that concepts are much more likely to be remembered experientially if they are presented in picture form than if they are presented in word form.
  • Positivity effect
    Positivity effect
    In psychology and cognitive science, the positivity effect is the tendency of people, when evaluating the causes of the behaviors of a person they like or prefer, to attribute the person's inherent disposition as the cause of their positive behaviors and the situations surrounding them as the cause...

    : that older adults favor positive over negative information in their memories.
  • Primacy effect, Recency effect & Serial position effect
    Serial position effect
    The serial position effect, a term coined by Hermann Ebbinghaus through studies he performed on himself, refers to the finding that recall accuracy varies as a function of an item's position within a study list . When asked to recall a list of items in any order , people tend to begin recall with...

    : that items near the end of a list are the easiest to recall, followed by the items at the beginning of a list; items in the middle are the least likely to be remembered.
  • Processing difficulty effect
  • Reminiscence bump
    Reminiscence bump
    The reminiscence bump is the tendency for older adults to have increased recollection for events that occurred during their adolescence and early adulthood...

    : the recalling of more personal events from adolescence and early adulthood than personal events from other lifetime periods (Rubin, Wetzler & Nebes, 1986; Rubin, Rahhal & Poon, 1998).
  • Rosy retrospection
    Rosy retrospection
    Rosy retrospection refers to the finding that subjects later rate past events more positively than they had actually rated them when the event occurred, reminiscent of the Latin phrase memoria praeteritorum bonorum ....

    : the remembering of the past as having been better than it really was.
  • Self-relevance effect: that memories relating to the self are better recalled than similar information relating to others.
  • Source Confusion: misattributing the source of a memory, e.g. misremembering that one saw an event personally when actually it was seen on television.
  • Spacing effect
    Spacing effect
    In psychology, the spacing effect refers to the fact that humans and animals more easily remember or learn items in a list when they are studied a few times over a long period of time , rather than studied repeatedly in a short period time .The phenomenon was first identified by Hermann Ebbinghaus;...

    : that information is better recalled if exposure to it is repeated over a longer span of time.
  • Stereotypical bias: memory distorted towards stereotypes (e.g. racial or gender), e.g. "black-sounding" names being misremembered as names of criminals
  • Suffix effect: the weakening of the recency effect in the case that an item is appended to the list that the subject is not required to recall (Morton, Crowder & Prussin, 1971).
  • Suggestibility
    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...

    : a form of misattribution where ideas suggested by a questioner are mistaken for memory.
  • Telescoping effect
    Telescoping effect
    In psychology and cognitive science, the telescoping effect is people's tendency to perceive recent events as being more remote than they are, and to perceive distant events as being more recent than they are. More specifically, the former is known as backward telescoping, and the latter as forward...

    : the tendency to displace recent events backward in time and remote events forward in time, so that recent events appear more remote, and remote events, more recent.
  • Testing effect
    Testing effect
    The testing effect refers to the higher probability of recalling an item resulting from the act of retrieving the item from memory versus additional study trials of the item. However, in order for this effect to be demonstrated the test trials must have a medium to high retrieval success...

    : that frequent testing of material that has been committed to memory improves memory recall.
  • Tip of the tongue
    Tip of the tongue
    The tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon is the failure to retrieve a word from memory, combined with partial recall and the feeling that retrieval is imminent...

    phenomenon: when a subject is able to recall parts of an item, or related information, but is frustratingly unable to recall the whole item. This is thought an instance of "blocking" where multiple similar memories are being recalled and interfere with each other
  • Verbatim effect: that the "gist" of what someone has said is better remembered than the verbatim wording (Poppenk, Walia, Joanisse, Danckert, & Köhler, 2006).
  • Von Restorff effect
    Von Restorff effect
    The Von Restorff effect , also called the isolation effect, predicts that an item that "stands out like a sore thumb" is more likely to be remembered than other items....

    : that an item that sticks out is more likely to be remembered than other items (von Restorff, 1933).
  • Zeigarnik effect: that uncompleted or interrupted tasks are remembered better than completed ones.

See also

  • Index of public relations-related articles
  • List of cognitive biases
  • List of common misconceptions
  • List of fallacies
  • List of misquotations
  • Recall bias
    Recall bias
    In psychology, recall bias is a type of systematic bias which occurs when the way a survey respondent answers a question is affected not just by the correct answer, but also by the respondent's memory. This can affect the results of the survey. As a hypothetical example, suppose that a survey in...

  • Cross-race effect
    Cross-race effect
    Cross-race effect is the tendency for people of one race to have difficulty recognizing and processing faces and facial expressions of members of a race or ethnic group other than their own....

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