Is the picture bizarreness effect a generation effect?

Abstract

Bizarre stimuli usually facilitate recall compared to common stimuli. This investigation explored the so-called bizarreness effect in free recall by using 80 simple line drawings of common objects (common vs bizarre). 64 subjects participated with 16 subjects in each group. Half of the subjects received learning instructions and the other half rated the bizarreness of each drawing. Moreover, drawings were presented either alone or with the name of the object under mixed-list encoding conditions. After the free recall task, subjects had to make metamemory judgments about how many items of each format they had seen and recalled. The key result was that a superiority of bizarre pictures over common ones was found in all conditions although performance was better when the pictures were presented alone than with their corresponding label. Subsequent metamemory judgments, however, showed that subjects underestimated the number of bizarre items actually recalled.