In a recall or memory task, people are asked to recall or recognize previous material.
Association •
Boundary extension: Remembering the background of an image as being larger or more expansive than the foreground •
Childhood amnesia: The retention of few memories from before the age of four. • : Incorrectly remembering one's past attitudes and behaviour as resembling present attitudes and behaviour. •
Contrast effect, the enhancement or reduction of a certain stimulus's perception when compared with a recently observed, contrasting object. •
Cryptomnesia, where a memory is mistaken for novel thought or imagination, because there is no subjective experience of it being a memory. •
Cue-dependent forgetting context effect: 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). •
Google effect: The tendency to forget information that can be found readily online by using Internet search engines. •
Duration neglect, the neglect of the duration of an episode in determining its value. •
Fading affect bias: A bias in which the emotion associated with unpleasant memories fades more quickly than the emotion associated with pleasant ones. •
False memory, where imagination is mistaken for a memory. • : 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. •
Implicit association, where the speed with which people can match words depends on how closely they are associated. • Lag effect: The phenomenon whereby learning is greater when studying is spread out over time, as opposed to studying the same amount of time in a single session. See also
spacing effect. •
Levels-of-processing effect: That different methods of encoding information into memory have different levels of effectiveness. •
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. •
Memory inhibition: Being shown some items from a list makes it harder to retrieve the other items (e.g., Slamecka, 1968). •
Misinformation effect: Memory becoming less accurate because of interference from
post-event information.
cf. continued influence effect, where misinformation about an event, despite later being corrected, continues to influence memory about the event. •
Modality effect: 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 through writing. •
Repetition blindness: Unexpected difficulty in remembering more than one instance of a visual sequence •
Mood-congruent memory bias (state-dependent memory): The improved recall of information congruent with one's current mood. •
Next-in-line effect: When taking turns speaking in a group using a predetermined order (e.g. going clockwise around a room, taking numbers, etc.) people tend to have diminished recall for the words of the person who spoke immediately before them. •
Part-list cueing effect: That being shown some items from a list and later retrieving one item causes it to become harder to retrieve the other items. •
Peak–end rule: 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. • The
Perky effect, where real images can influence imagined images, or be misremembered as imagined rather than real •
Picture superiority effect: The notion that concepts that are learned by viewing pictures are more easily and frequently recalled than are concepts that are learned by viewing their written word form counterparts. • Positivity effect (
Socioemotional selectivity theory): Older adults' tendency to favor good over bad information in their memories. See also
euphoric recall • : That information that takes longer to read and is thought about more (processed with more difficulty) is more easily remembered. See also
levels-of-processing effect. •
Reminiscence bump: The recalling of more personal events from adolescence and early adulthood than personal events from other lifetime periods. •
Social cryptomnesia, a failure by people and society in general to remember the origin of a change, in which people know that a change has occurred in society, but forget how this change occurred; that is, the steps that were taken to bring this change about, and who took these steps. This has led to reduced social credit towards the minorities who made major sacrifices that led to a change in societal values. •
Source confusion, episodic memories are confused with other information, creating distorted memories. •
Spacing effect: That information is better recalled if exposure to it is repeated over a long span of time rather than a short one. • : Diminishment of the
recency effect because a sound item is appended to the list that the subject is
not required to recall. A form of
serial position effect. cf.
recency effect and
primacy effect. •
Suggestibility, where ideas suggested by a questioner are mistaken for memory. •
Telescoping effect: The tendency to displace recent events backwards in time and remote events forward in time, so that recent events appear more remote, and remote events, more recent. •
Testing effect: The fact that one more easily recall information one has read by rewriting it instead of rereading it. Frequent testing of material that has been committed to memory improves memory recall. •
Tip of the tongue 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 to be an instance of "blocking" where multiple similar memories are being recalled and interfere with each other. This is because memories are representations, not exact copies. •
Zeigarnik effect: That uncompleted or interrupted tasks are remembered better than completed ones.
Baseline •
Bizarreness effect: Bizarre material is better remembered than common material. •
Frequency illusion or Baader–Meinhof phenomenon. The frequency illusion is that once something has been noticed then every instance of that thing is noticed, leading to the belief it has a high frequency of occurrence (a form of
selection bias). The Baader–Meinhof phenomenon is the illusion where something that has recently come to one's attention suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency shortly afterwards. It was named after an incidence of frequency illusion in which the
Baader–Meinhof Group was mentioned. • : 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. •
Negativity bias or Negativity effect: The phenomenon of having better
recall of unpleasant memories than of pleasant ones. See also
recency effect,
primacy effect and
suffix effect. •
von Restorff effect: That an item that sticks out is more likely to be remembered than other items.
Inertia •
Attentional bias, the tendency of perception to be affected by recurring thoughts. • : Misinformation continues to influence memory and reasoning about an event, despite the misinformation having been corrected. cf.
misinformation effect, where the original memory is affected by incorrect information received later. • Stereotype bias or stereotypical bias: Memory distorted towards stereotypes (e.g., racial or gender).
Outcome •
Choice-supportive bias: The tendency to remember one's choices as better than they actually were. •
Declinism: The predisposition to view the past favorably (
rosy retrospection) and the future unfavorably. •
Euphoric recall: The tendency of people to remember past experiences favorably while overlooking bad experiences associated with them. •
Hindsight bias: Sometimes called the "I-knew-it-all-along" effect, or the "Hindsight is 20/20" effect, is the tendency to see past events as having been predictable before they happened. •
Recency illusion: The illusion that a phenomenon one has noticed only recently is itself recent. Often used to refer to linguistic phenomena; the illusion that a word or language usage that one has noticed only recently is an innovation when it is, in fact, long-established (see also
frequency illusion). Also
recency bias is a
cognitive bias that favors recent events over historic ones. A
memory bias, recency bias gives "greater importance to the most recent event", such as the final lawyer's closing argument a jury hears before being dismissed to deliberate. •
Rosy retrospection: The remembering of the past as having been better than it really was.
Self-perspective •
Cross-race effect: The tendency for people of one race to have difficulty identifying members of a race other than their own. • Gender differences in eyewitness memory: The tendency for a witness to remember more details about someone of the same gender. •
Generation effect (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. • Placement bias: Tendency to remember ourselves to be better than others at tasks at which we rate ourselves above average (also
Illusory superiority or
Better-than-average effect) •
Self-relevance effect: That memories relating to the self are better recalled than similar information relating to others. == Opinion reporting ==