Bizarre Effects Research Articles

The bizarre imagery effect and intention to learn

The bizarre imagery effect, better memory for bizarre stimuli than for common stimuli, is now an established finding. However, the mnemonic benefits of bizarre imagery are subject to several constraints (e.g., the use of mixed lists and free-recall tests). A further constraint on the bizarreness effect is demonstrated here. In each of two experiments, subjects were given either incidental or intentional study instructions and were asked to rate the vividness of the images they formed from the bizarre and common sentences. Contrary to conclusions based on available evidence, the bizarreness effect in free recall was manifested only with the incidental learning instructions. This additional constraint on the effect is consistent with the item-order account of bizarreness.

A Note on the ‘Quantum Eraser’

This note aims to make more familiar to philosophers yet another bizarre quantum mechanical effect with disturbing metaphysical implications. It is possible to modify the classic double-slit experiment so that one can register the path of a particle to determine which slit it passes through, and then erase this registered information so that the interference effects which would normally disappear upon registration of the “which path” information are reconstituted. Thus the “trajectory” of particles can be effected by temporally and spatially distant operations on the slit detectors. Nonetheless, no untoward effects (such as superluminal signalling) can result from the operation of the eraser.

Subject-Generated Bizarreness: Imagery or Semantic Processing

The bizarreness effect was assessed when subjects were instructed to generate bizarre and common images, sentences, or both from single noun or noun pair presentations. Stimulus interval times were 45 s. Subject-generated materials produced the bizarreness effect when subjects were instructed to image, create sentences, or perform both tasks. These findings were independent of whether single nouns or noun pairs were presented. It was concluded that in this paradigm, imaginal processes may be unimportant in producing the effect. The predictions of several hypotheses that attempt to account for the bizarreness effect are compared.

Intralist and Extralist Sources of Distinctiveness and the Bizarreness Effect: The Importance of Contrast

The roles played by intralist and extralist distinctiveness with respect to the recall of bizarre and common sentences was investigated in two experiments. In Experiment 1, a greater percentage of bizarre than common sentences was accessed in predominantly common lists and in lists containing equal numbers of common and bizarre items. Reciprocally, a greater percentage of common than bizarre sentences was accessed in predominantly bizarre lists. In Experiment 2, contrast (i.e., the degree of separation between common and bizarre sentence types) was manipulated. In high-contrast lists, intralist distinctiveness was more powerful than extralist distinctiveness associated with bizarreness. The opposite was true for low-contrast lists. The results support an extension of the distinctiveness hypothesis to include the independent effects of intralist and extralist distinctiveness and suggest related limiting conditions. In recent years, much of the research investigating bizarre mnemonics has been guided by explanations and hypotheses that incorporate the distinctiveness construct. McDaniel and Einstein (1986), who provided the first formal extension of the distinctiveness account to bizarreness research, have suggested that distinctiveness may be at the heart of the bizarreness effect. In their review of the previous literature, McDaniel and Einstein found that investigators that have found bizarreness to be an effective memory aid have usually incorporated the use of a withinlist design. Those that have used a between-list design tended not to find the significant effect. Thus, when subjects are presented with bizarre and common items within the same list, results indicate a mnemonic advantage for the bizarre items. In their study, McDaniel and Einstein hypothesized that, in a mixed list, the bizarre items are made distinct by the presence of the common items and are, therefore, better recalled. To support their distinctiveness hypothesis, they demonstrated a mnemonic benefit for bizarre sentences accessed when subjects were presented with lists containing equal numbers of common and bizarre sentences. Also in support of the distinctiveness hypothesis, Einstein, McDaniel, and Lackey (1989) showed that when subjects were presented with unmixed

The bizarreness effect: it's not surprising, it's complex.

Higher recall of bizarre images relative to common images (the bizarreness effect) is consistently found when bizarreness is varied as a within-subject (mixed-list) variable. In Experiment 1, mixed lists, rather than the smaller number of bizarre sentences typically used in such lists, determined the occurrence of the bizarreness effect. Contrary to predictions from expectation-violation theory, Experiments 2 and 3 showed that manipulations designed to augment or attenuate surprise reactions to bizarre sentences had little impact on the bizarreness effect. Experiments 4 and 5 indicated that mixing affected the degree to which participants differentially encoded order information for bizarre and common items. A new account of the bizarreness effect is presented that combines considerations of distinctiveness with the differential use of order information across bizarre and common items.

The bizarreness effect: It's not surprising, it's complex.

The bizarreness effect: It's not surprising, it's complex.

Further constraints on the bizarreness effect: Elaboration at encoding Bridget Robinson-Riegler

In this study, we attempted to determine why the mnemonic benefit of bizarreness is not found with the use of complex sentences (i.e., those containing additional modifiers of nouns) as stimuli. Several explanations were investigated, including the idea that complexity reduces the imageability of the sentence and the idea that complexity itself is mnemonically beneficial. The results of four experiments favored the latter explanation. We suggest that the cues associated with the complexity of the sentence provide more effective or salient retrieval cues than do those associated with sentence bizarreness. Consequently, the mnemonic benefit of bizarreness appears to occur only with relatively impoverished encoding contexts (e.g., simple, unelaborated sentences).

The bizarreness effect with complex sentences: Temporal effects.

Abstract present experiment examined the relation between the time allotted to process complex bizarre and common sentences (15, 30 or 60 s) and the demonstration of the effect. Sentence recall was superior for bizarre relative to common sentences when presentation times were 30 s or more. No bizarreness effect was evident when presentation times were restricted to 15 s. It was suggested that subjects require an extended amount of time to reorganize complex bizarre sentences into meaningful ones and that it is this process that enhances bizarre sentence recall.Resume L'experience dont il est question consiste a comparer le temps mis a traiter des phrases complexes bizarres et des phrases ordinaires (15, 30 ou 60 s), et a demontrer I'effet de la bizarrerie. Le rappel etait meilleur pour les phrases bizarres que pour les phrases ordinaires lorsque le temps de presentation durait 30 s ou plus. On n'a constate aucun effet de la bizarrerie lorsque le temps de presentation etait limite a 15 s. On avance l'hypothese que les sujets puissent avoir besoin de plus de temps pour reorganiser les phrases complexes bizarres en phrases signifiantes, et que c'est ce processus qui ameliore le rappel des phrases bizarres.For more than two decades psychologists have examined the bizarreness effect under controlled laboratory conditions. Operationally the bizarreness effect is defined as the facilitation of recall for bizarre items relative to normal/common ones. In general, the experimental evidence is conflicting and, according to recent reviews (Einstein & McDaniel, 1987; Wollen & Margres, 1987) the bizarreness effect occurs only in limited circumstances.In brief, (a) the bizarreness advantage is, with few exceptions, demonstrable only in mixed lists, i.e., within subjects designs (McDaniel & Einstein, 1986); (b) the advantage for bizarre items is primarily a free recall effect (Bergfeld, Choate, & Kroll, 1982; Hirshman, Whelley, & Palij, 1989; Kroll & Tu, 1988; McDaniel & Einstein, 1986; Pra Baldi, DeBeni, Cornoldi, & Cavedon, 1985; Webber & Marshall, 1978; Wollen & Cox, 1981a, 1981b); (c) total nouns recalled is a composite measure of the sentence access, i.e., retrieving distinct sentences, and the items - per - sentence, i.e., retrieving items within each sentence. bizarreness effect is a function of sentence access and not items - per - sentence (Einstein & McDaniel, 1987; McDaniel & Einstein, 1986; Wollen & Margres, 1987). Thus, the bizarreness effect occurs when the sentences accessed are sufficiently strong to outweigh the negative contribution of items - per - sentence; and, (d) the bizarreness effect is only found with simple sentences. However, a recent study by Imai and Richman (1991) suggested that the bizarreness effect may occur with complex sentences if complexity is defined in terms of the illogical nature of the sentences.Sentence complexity has traditionally been defined as extending the length of simple sentences by adding two modifiers to each noun (McDaniel & Einstein, 1989). Thus, a simple bizarre sentence such as The Maid licked the Ammonia off the Table is converted to a complex bizarre sentence by the addition of six adjectives to the sentence, e.g.,The tall, blond Maid licked the heavy, clear Ammonia off the round, mahogany Table. Employing similar complex sentences, McDaniel and Einstein (1989, Exp. 2) found little evidence for the bizarreness effect for 7 and 14 s sentence presentation times.McDaniel and Einstein's (1989, Exp. 2) procedures were different from those used by Imai and Richman (1991). McDaniel and Einstein (1989) defined complexity by adding two modifiers to each noun in their simple sentences whereas Imai and Richman (1991) defined complexity as unintelligible, meaningless simple sentences, e.g., The TABLE dropped the MAID out of the AMMONIA. Furthermore, McDaniel and Einstein (1989) extended their presentation times from 7 to 14 s, whereas Imai and Richman (1991) used 7 s and 35 s presentation times. …

Bizarreness effects in verbal tasks and subject-performed tasks

Abstract Recognition and cued recall of ordinary action phrases (e.g. “open the book”) and bizarre ones (e.g. “plant the hammer”) were compared under two encoding conditions: in verbal tasks (VTs), subjects learned the phrases by simply listening to them; in subject-performed tasks (SPTs), subjects learned the phrases by performing the denoted actions (without real objects). Memory performance was better after SPTs than after VTs in recognition and cued recall. In addition to this already established finding, it was observed that recognition was better for bizarre phrases than for ordinary ones after VTs and that bizarreness was unrelated to recognition after SPTs. Cued recall, on the other hand, depended on bizarreness after VTs as well as after SPTs and, in contrast to the recognition findings, ordinary phrases were recalled better than bizarre phrases. This pattern of findings was explained by the assumptions that lexical and conceptual information is encoded after VTs and motor information is addition...

Exotic states in long-range spin glasses

We consider Ising spin glasses onZd with couplingsJxy=cy−xZxy, where thecy's are nonrandom real coefficients and theZxy's are independent, identically distributed random variables withE[Zxy]=0 andE[Zxy2]=1. We prove that if ∑y|cy|=∞ while ∑y|cy|2=∞, then (with probability one) there are uncountably many (infinite volume) ground states\(\tilde \sigma \), each of which has the following property: forany temperatureT<∞, there is a Gibbs state supported entirely on (infinite volume) spin configurations which differ from\(\tilde \sigma \) only atfinitely many sites. This and related results are examples of the bizarre effects that can occur in disordered systems with coupling-dependent boundary conditions.

Bizarreness effect in dream recall.

This study aimed to ascertain a) whether morning reports of dream experience more frequently reproduce bizarre contents of night reports than nonbizarre ones and b) whether this effect depends on the rarity of bizarre contents in the dream or on their richer encoding in memory. Ten subjects were awakened in rapid eye movement (REM) sleep three times per night for 4 nonconsecutive nights and asked to report their previous dream experiences. In the morning they were asked to re-report those dreams. Two separate pairs of judges scored the reports: the former identified the parts in each report with bizarre events, characters or feelings and the latter parsed each report into content units using transformational grammar criteria. By combining the data of the two analyses, content units were classified as bizarre or nonbizarre and, according to whether present in both the night and corresponding morning reports, as semantically equivalent or nonequivalent. The proportion of bizarre contents common to night and morning reports was about twice that of nonbizarre contents and was positively correlated to the quantity of bizarre contents present in the night report. These findings support the view that bizarreness enhances recall of dream contents and that this memory advantage is determined by a richer encoding at the moment of dream generation. Such a view would seem to explain why dreams in everyday life, which are typically remembered after a rather long interval, appear more markedly bizarre than those recalled in the sleep laboratory.

A multinomial modeling analysis of the mnemonic benefits of bizarre imagery

A series of experiments was conducted to explore the cognitive processes that mediate the bizarreness effect, that is, the finding that bizarre or unusual imagery is recalled better than common imagery. In all experiments, subjects were presented with noun pairs that were embedded within bizarre or common sentences in a mixed-list design. None of the experiments produced a bizarreness effect for cued recall; however, for two of the experiments, the bizarre noun pairs were remembered significantly better than the common pairs for free recall. To determine if these differences were due to the storage or retrieval of the items, a multinomial model for the analysis of imagery mediation in paired-associate learning was developed and applied to the data from the experiments. The model revealed that bizarre sentences benefited the retrieval of the noun pairs but not their storage within memory. The empirical and modeling results are discussed relative to previous findings and theories on the bizarreness effect.

Is the bizarreness effect a special case of sentence reorganization?

The effects on memory of two types of bizarre sentences (rarely occurring, or atypical, and never occurring, or illogical) were investigated in comparison with those of common sentences. In Experiment 1, the effects of these three types of sentences, which were presented for 7 sec, were measured in mixed-list conditions. Evidence for the bizarreness effect (advantageous memorial effects of bizarre sentences over common ones) was found only with atypical and common sentences. In Experiment 2, the stimulus presentation time was 35 sec; free-recall and sentence-access performance were superior for the illogical sentences as opposed to the common and the atypical sentences. A proposal based on the assumption that subjects tend to spontaneously modify sentence structure is suggested.

The imagery bizarreness effect as a function of sentence complexity and presentation time

Two experiments were carried out to examine the relationship between the bizarreness effect (more words recalled from bizarre images than from common images), sentence complexity, and presentation time. Experiment 1 showed that the bizarreness effect was not influenced by processing time when simple sentences were used. However, for complex sentences, an interaction occurred such that nouns from common sentences were recalled better with an 11-sec presentation rate, and nouns from bizarre sentences were recalled better with a 15-sec presentation rate. This interaction was replicated in Experiment 2. These results show that the bizarreness effect does occur for complex sentences, provided that enough processing time is given. The results also suggest that reviews of the bizarreness literature need to consider processing time as a potentially important variable.

Case report 571

A case of a 23-year-old man with deformities of the spine and hip is presented, demonstrating the bizarre long term effects of radiation on developing bone. The spectrum of radiation-induced growth abnormalities is reviewed. Multiple variables, including age of the patient, the quantity of radiation delivered, and the site of delivery, all effect the eventual radiographic appearance.

Mental layouts of concealed objects as a function of imagery type and experimental conditions

We examined whether concealed imagery was an effective mnemonic aid in the immediate recall of paired objects by conducting a study that contained explicitly worded instructions to conceal certain objects. Forty subjects were presented with counterbalanced verbal descriptions of concealed, pictorial, and separate object interactions; the descriptions were further categorized according to the type of image elicited, whether normal or bizarre. Results replicated Kerr and Neisser’s (1983) findings, with pictorial interactions being recalled better than were concealed or separate. Furthermore, the bizarre effects obtained suggested these types of images had poorer recall and elicited lower vividness ratings than did normal types across the three conditions, with bizarre concealed images generating the lowest ratings of all. It remains to be determined whether these images can be mnemonically effective over delayed recall periods.

Sentence complexity eliminates the mnemonic advantage of bizarre imagery

Research has consistently shown that bizarre sentences are better remembered than common sentences when bizarreness is manipulated within-subjects, memory is assessed with free recall, and the processing instructions emphasize the use of imagery. Even though previous research conforms remarkably to this pattern, a recent exception to this pattern (Kroll, Schepeler, & Angin, 1986, Experiment 1) suggests that there are additional factors that control bizarre imagery effects. Several methodological factors were experimentally examined to try to identify the reason for the discrepancy between the Kroll et al. findings and the rest of the literature. The results indicated that the complexity of the stimulus materials can eliminate the bizarreness effect. Several explanations for this finding are discussed.

Long-Term Retention of Plausible vs Bizarre Paired Associates as a Function of Cued Recall

Past research has shown that bizarre imagery facilitates long-term recall of noun pairs. An experiment was executed to investigate the effects of bizarreness when more pronounced delays were used. Undergraduate subjects were shown 30 plausible and 30 bizarre scenes, asked to rate the pictures on their own image scale, and were then given an unexpected recall test 1 or 2 wk. later. Analysis indicated that bizarre images aided recall only under the 2-wk. delay. We have suggested that interference over time may be less with bizarre images, especially when an incidental learning paradigm is employed.

The bizarre mnemonic

Five experiments measured effects of bizarre contexts on the free recall of noun triplets after brief retention intervals. More triplets were remembered from bizarre than from common contexts in short mixed lists (12 sentences) when the sentences were presented at a controlled (10 seconds/sentence) rate, regardless of incidental task (rating images for bizarreness, vividness, or memorability). The average number of words/sentence recalled, however, tended to be higher for common than for bizarre contexts. No memory benefit from bizarreness was found for pure lists nor for lists containing more than six triplets in bizarre contexts. The bizarreness effect was less when the subject controlled the rate of presentation. A sixth experiment, which tested recall after immediate and two-day retention intervals, found that the Bizarre/Common Context by Pure/Mixed List interaction increased over longer retention intervals.

The Influence of the Nature of Material and of Mental Operations on the Occurrence of the Bizarreness Effect

In the literature, a memory advantage for bizarre items over common ones has been found only in a few studies, especially with materials prepared ad hoc by the experimenter and with free recall rather than cued recall tests. These results contrast with the widespread conviction that bizarreness helps recall. The present paper explores the role of some variables involved in the “bizarreness” effect: (1) It examines the typical self-generation procedure in which the subject is asked to create an interaction between a pair of nouns, as well as the case in which only one noun is given. Higher freedom in generating sentences appears to correspond to higher free recall of bizarre items. (2) It is shown that bizarre items must be distinguished from “unusual” ones, which have different effects on memory. (3) By contrasting groups instructed to use either imagery or verbal elaboration, it is shown that the bizarreness effect is linked to the use of imagery. Instructions to use imagery without the possibility of creating bizarre representations do not improve the recall of common items. (4) The classification of parts of sentences generated reveals that, under common instructions, one subject's choice of verb and noun is more likely to be shared by other subjects. This fact may explain the different effects found by previous research in cued and free recall. (5) The overestimation of the recallability of bizarre items appears less evident than in previous research, probably because subjects had direct experience of the difficulties met in generating bizarre images.