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The Von Restorff effect, also called the isolation effect, was named after German psychiatrist and children's pediatrician Hedwig von Restorff (1906–1962). It predicts the enhancement of memory for items or events that differ from their context. Von Restorff proposed this effect in 1993 in a paper she wrote about the experiments she conducted using the isolation paradigm. Using a delayed recall measure, she found that participants had better memory of the isolated materials compared to the average recall of the remaining list items. Further research has shown that isolation can be generated from physically changing the stimulus in some way, such as size, shape, color, spacing, and underlining. Also, differentiation through meaningfulness has been seen to produce similar results.

Examples

For example, 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. Additionally, in the following list of words - desk, chair, bed, table, chipmunk, dresser, stool, couch - chipmunk will be remembered the most as it stands out against the other words in its meaning.

Explanation of effect

There are different theories proposed to explain the increased performance of isolated items. The total-time hypothesis suggests that isolated items are rehearsed for a longer time in working memory compared to non-isolated items. Another approach offers that subjects could consider the isolated items to be in their own special category in a free-recall task, making them easier to recollect. A separate explanation is based upon the analysis of the deep processing of similarities and differences among the items. Debate surrounds whether perceptual salience and differential attention are necessary to produce this effect. Modern theory holds that the contextual incongruity of the isolate is what leads to the differential attention to this item. Based on this assumption, an isolation effect would not be expected if the isolated item were presented prior to some consistent context, a theory that goes against von Restorff’s findings.