Bizarreness and recall

Abstract

Although memory experts have long advocated the use of bizarre imagery to aid memory, most research has failed to find bizarreness to be effective. Recently, bizarreness has been shown to be effective, but those experiments involved mixed lists in which each subject had both bizarre and nonbizarre materials. The goal of the present research was to use the same materials but in an unmixed-list design in which each subject had only bizarre or only nonbizarre sentences. Contrary to previous research, there were no significant differences between bizarre and nonbizarre conditions in terms of the number of individual words recalled, and bizarreness produced significantly lower recall of complete sentences. It was concluded that bizarreness is effective only when bizarre and nonbizarre materials are provided by the experimenter in a mixed-list situation. © 1981, The Psychonomic Society, Inc.. All rights reserved.