List of memory biases
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In psychology and cognitive science, a memory bias is a cognitive bias that either enhances or impairs the recall of a memory (either the chances that the memory will be recalled at all, or the amount of time it takes for it to be recalled, or both), or that alters the content of a reported memory. There are many types of memory bias, including:
- Choice-supportive bias: remembering chosen options as having been better than rejected options (Mather, Shafir & Johnson, 2000).
- Classroom effect: that classroom environment and teacher (as opposed to purely individual factors) explain some portion of student performance.
- Context effect: that cognition and memory are dependent on context, such that out-of-context memories are more difficult to retrieve than in-context memories (e.g., recall time and accuracy for a work-related memory will be lower at home, and vice versa).
- Hindsight bias: the inclination to see past events as being predictable; also called the "I-knew-it-all-along" effect.
- Humor effect: that humorous items are more easily remembered than non-humorous ones, which might be explained by the distinctiveness of humor, the increased cognitive processing time to understand the humor, or the emotional arousal caused by the humor.
- Infantile amnesia: the retention of few memories from before the age of two years.
- Generation effect: that self-generated information is remembered best.
- Lag effect
- Levels-of-processing effect: that different methods of encoding information into memory have different levels of effectiveness (Craik & Lockhart, 1972).
- List-length effect
- Mere exposure effect: that familiarity increases liking.
- Misinformation effect: that misinformation affects people's reports of their own memory.
- Modality effect: that memory recall is higher for the last items of a list when the list items were received via speech than when they were received via writing.
- Mood congruent memory bias: the improved recall of information congruent with one's current mood.
- Next-in-line effect
- Part-list cueing effect: that being shown some items from a list makes it harder to retrieve the other items (e.g., Slamecka, 1968).
- Picture superiority effect: that concepts are much more likely to be remembered experientially if they are presented in picture form than if they are presented in word form.
- Positivity effect: that older adults favor positive over negative information in their memories.
- Processing difficulty effect
- Primacy effect: that the first items on a list show an advantage in memory.
- Recency effect: that the last items on a list show an advantage in memory.
- Reminiscence bump: the recalling of more personal events from adolescence and early adulthood than personal events from other lifetime periods (Rubin, Wetzler & Nebes, 1986; Rubin, Rahhal & Poon, 1998).
- Rosy retrospection: the remembering of the past as having been better than it really was.
- Serial position effect: that items at the beginning of a list are the easiest to recall, followed by the items near the end of a list; items in the middle are the least likely to be remembered.
- Self-generation effect: that people are better able to recall memories of statements that they have generated than similar statements generated by others.
- Self-relevance effect: that memories considered self-relevant are better recalled than other, similar information.
- Spacing effect: that information is better recalled if exposure to it is repeated over a longer span of time.
- Suffix effect: the weakening of the recency effect in the case that an item is appended to the list that the subject is not required to recall (Morton, Crowder & Prussin, 1972).
- Telescoping effect: the tendency to displace recent events backward in time and remote events forward in time, so that recent events appear to be more remote, and remote events, more recent.
- Testing effect: that frequent testing of material that has been committed to memory improves memory recall.
- Verbatim effect: that the "gist" of what someone has said is better remembered than the verbatim wording (Poppenk, Walia, Joanisse, Danckert, & Köhler, 2006).
- Von Restorff effect: that an item that sticks out is more likely to be remembered than other items (von Restorff, 1933).
- Zeigarnik effect: that uncompleted or interrupted tasks are remembered better than completed ones.
