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 to be remembered than other items.

For instance, if a person examines a shopping list with one item highlighted in bright green, he or she will be more likely to remember the highlighted item than any of the others.

This distinctiveness may also come in the form of humor, in which case the humor effect occurs. Similarly, specific examples include the bizarreness effect and the 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...

.