Studying
consumer reactions to the ‘Von Restorff Effect’
The Von
Restorff effect (named after psychiatrist and children's
paediatrician Hedwig von Restorff 1906–1962), also called the isolation
effect, predicts that an item that "stands out like a sore thumb"
(called distinctive encoding) is more likely to be remembered than other
items. A bias in favour of remembering the unusual.
Modern
theory of the isolation effect emphasizes perceptual salience and accompanying
differential attention to the isolated item as necessary for enhanced memory.
In fact, von Restorff, whose paper is not available in English, presented
evidence that perceptual salience is not necessary for the isolation effect.
She further argued that the difference between the isolated and surrounding
items is not sufficient to produce isolation effects but must be considered in
the context of similarity.
Von
Restorff worked as a postdoctoral assistant to Wolfgang Köhler at the
Psychological Institute of the University of Berlin up to the time that Köhler
resigned in protest against Nazi interference with the Institute. (Köhler’s
resignation in 1935 was precipitated by the dismissal of his postdoctoral
assistants, who included not only von Restorff but also Karl Duncker)
During
her time in Köhler’s laboratory, von Restorff published two papers, the second
of which she co-authored with Köhler (Köhler & von Restorff, 1935). Von
Restorff proposed the isolation effect in a paper she wrote in 1933 on the
topic of spontaneous reminding which included a prescient discussion of the
role of intentionality in the memory test.
For
instance, 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.
Relevance
in the Marketing Domain
In
the 'attention age', when the plethora of media around us in constantly
battling for a moment of our time, marketers 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.
