How to Remember Something or How to Make Information Memorable.
What makes something memorable. In my presentation skills class I share the imporatance of making something novel and unique. Taylor & Fiske, (1978) indicated that attention is usually captured by salient, novel, surprising, or distinctive stimuli. These may be used to enhance the von Restorff effect.

Here is another memory enhancing effect.

"Von Restorff Effect

Explanations - Memory - Von Restorff Effect



Description
We remember things that stand out.

Example
Try to remember this list (take a few seconds and then look away):

Jump
Cut
Run
Fly
Duck-billed platypus
Read
Build
Lay
The chance is that you will easily remember 'duck-billed platypus', because it stands out by being a noun, physically longer, italic and red. This is an extreme example, but it does highlight the effect. When the item in question stands out less, the likelihood of it being remembered also decreases.

Discussion
The Von Restorff effect was identified by Hedwig von Restorff in 1933. She conducted a set of memory experiments around isolated and distinctive items, concluding that an isolated item, in a list of otherwise similar items, would be better remembered than an item in the same relative position in a list where all items were similar.

There can also be a reverse effect here. You remember the unique item, but the attention that it grabs from you is removed from other items -- thus you may in fact remember less overall.

Hedwig's work relates to Gestalt, where she related it to the Figure and Ground principles.

In the 'attention age', when the plethora of media around us is constantly battling for a moment of our time, advertisers make much use of this principle, each vying with the other to stand out from the crowd and hence be remembered by the target audience.

The Von Restorff effect is also called the Isolation Effect or the Distinctiveness Principle (Nelson, 1979). The same principle has also been described as prominence effects (Gardner, 1983) environmental salience effects (Taylor & Fiske, 1978), and novel popout effect (Johnson, Hawley, Plewe, Elliott, & De Witt, 1990).

So what?
If you want people to remember something, make it stand out. You can be very creative in this.

See also