The fan effect [1] is a psychological phenomenon under the branch of cognitive psychology where recognition times or error rate for a particular concept increases as more information about the concept is acquired. The word "fan" refers to the number of associations correlated with the concept.
The fan effect first appeared in a series of experiments conducted by John R. Anderson, a cognitive psychologist, in 1974. [2] The three experiments he conducted involved participants learning 26 sentences that paired a person with a location. Additionally, they were asked to determine whether or not a particular sentence that was given to them belonged to the 26 they were asked to study. An example of a sentence Anderson used in his experiment was: "A hippie is in the park." Some sentences seemed similar in the sense that a person was paired with another location. For instance, "A hippie is in the church." Results revealed that participants produced a longer retrieval time when a person was paired with more than one location. Overall, these experiments demonstrated that multiple associations, such as including a large number of nouns in a sentence, interfered with the recognition time by producing a much slower effect. [3] Association splitting, a self-help technique devised for individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), builds upon the fan-effect. In OCD, associations are typically constricted to OCD-related meanings (e.g., fire = danger, cancer = death). Patients are taught to contemplate alternative meanings to reduce the strength of fearful associations (e.g., fire = diamond, cancer = zodiac sign). According to a systematic review, the technique leads to a significant reduction of OCD symptoms relative to control conditions. [4]
Memory stores information in a network of nodes that are linked together. [5] When a memory is retrieved, activation spreads on the links until it intersects or enough time has passed. If there is one association, the activation only has to spread to a single link whereas multiple associations would divide the activation to many links. Because there are so many connections, longer time is required to identify the concepts and retrieve the memory.
The fan effect is due to multiple mental models and is included as part of the ACT-R theory. [6] The key factors that the fan effect is dependent on are the strength and degree to which one of the variables can predict the other and the importance of the concept to a person during the retrieval process. Concepts can be better recognized by similar ideas instead of a random order of ideas. When stored in a random order, the concepts are placed in independent places in the brain instead of putting the concepts together as one unit. The fan effect can be reduced if random sentences are exposed frequently and unified into one concept. [7] The time it takes to retrieve information using the fan effect increases with age because of age-related effects/interference with retrieval. [8]
The interference theory is a theory regarding human memory. Interference occurs in learning. The notion is that memories encoded in long-term memory (LTM) are forgotten and cannot be retrieved into short-term memory (STM) because either memory could interfere with the other. There is an immense number of encoded memories within the storage of LTM. The challenge for memory retrieval is recalling the specific memory and working in the temporary workspace provided in STM. Retaining information regarding the relevant time of encoding memories into LTM influences interference strength. There are two types of interference effects: proactive and retroactive interference.
The mere-exposure effect is a psychological phenomenon by which people tend to develop a liking or disliking for things merely because they are familiar with them. In social psychology, this effect is sometimes called the familiarity principle. The effect has been demonstrated with many kinds of things, including words, Chinese characters, paintings, pictures of faces, geometric figures, and sounds. In studies of interpersonal attraction, the more often people see a person, the more pleasing and likeable they find that person.
The picture superiority effect refers to the phenomenon in which pictures and images are more likely to be remembered than are words. This effect has been demonstrated in numerous experiments using different methods. It is based on the notion that "human memory is extremely sensitive to the symbolic modality of presentation of event information". Explanations for the picture superiority effect are not concrete and are still being debated, however an evolutionary explanation is that sight has a long history stretching back millions of years and was crucial to survival in the past, whereas reading is a relatively recent invention, and requires specific cognitive processes, such as decoding symbols and linking them to meaning.
The testing effect suggests long-term memory is increased when part of the learning period is devoted to retrieving information from memory. It is different from the more general practice effect, defined in the APA Dictionary of Psychology as "any change or improvement that results from practice or repetition of task items or activities."
Serial-position effect is the tendency of a person to recall the first and last items in a series best, and the middle items worst. The term was coined by Hermann Ebbinghaus through studies he performed on himself, and refers to the finding that recall accuracy varies as a function of an item's position within a study list. When asked to recall a list of items in any order, people tend to begin recall with the end of the list, recalling those items best. Among earlier list items, the first few items are recalled more frequently than the middle items.
The generation effect is a phenomenon whereby information is better remembered if it is generated from one's own mind rather than simply read. Researchers have struggled to fully explain why generated information is better recalled than read information, as no single explanation has been comprehensive.
Artificial grammar learning (AGL) is a paradigm of study within cognitive psychology and linguistics. Its goal is to investigate the processes that underlie human language learning by testing subjects' ability to learn a made-up grammar in a laboratory setting. It was developed to evaluate the processes of human language learning but has also been utilized to study implicit learning in a more general sense. The area of interest is typically the subjects' ability to detect patterns and statistical regularities during a training phase and then use their new knowledge of those patterns in a testing phase. The testing phase can either use the symbols or sounds used in the training phase or transfer the patterns to another set of symbols or sounds as surface structure.
Robert Allen Bjork is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on human learning and memory and on the implications of the science of learning for instruction and training. He is the creator of the directed forgetting paradigm. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.
Thought suppression is a psychoanalytical defense mechanism. It is a type of motivated forgetting in which an individual consciously attempts to stop thinking about a particular thought. It is often associated with obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD). OCD is when a person will repeatedly attempt to prevent or "neutralize" intrusive distressing thoughts centered on one or more obsessions. It is also thought to be a cause of memory inhibition, as shown by research using the think/no think paradigm. Thought suppression is relevant to both mental and behavioral levels, possibly leading to ironic effects that are contrary to intention. Ironic process theory is one cognitive model that can explain the paradoxical effect.
The modality effect is a term used in experimental psychology, most often in the fields dealing with memory and learning, to refer to how learner performance depends on the presentation mode of studied items.
Metamemory or Socratic awareness, a type of metacognition, is both the introspective knowledge of one's own memory capabilities and the processes involved in memory self-monitoring. This self-awareness of memory has important implications for how people learn and use memories. When studying, for example, students make judgments of whether they have successfully learned the assigned material and use these decisions, known as "judgments of learning", to allocate study time.
In psychology, context-dependent memory is the improved recall of specific episodes or information when the context present at encoding and retrieval are the same. In a simpler manner, "when events are represented in memory, contextual information is stored along with memory targets; the context can therefore cue memories containing that contextual information". One particularly common example of context-dependence at work occurs when an individual has lost an item in an unknown location. Typically, people try to systematically "retrace their steps" to determine all of the possible places where the item might be located. Based on the role that context plays in determining recall, it is not at all surprising that individuals often quite easily discover the lost item upon returning to the correct context. This concept is heavily related to the encoding specificity principle.
Priming is a concept in psychology to describe how exposure to one stimulus may influence a response to a subsequent stimulus, without conscious guidance or intention. The priming effect is the positive or negative effect of a rapidly presented stimulus on the processing of a second stimulus that appears shortly after. Generally speaking, the generation of priming effect depends on the existence of some positive or negative relationship between priming and target stimuli. For example, the word nurse might be recognized more quickly following the word doctor than following the word bread. Priming can be perceptual, associative, repetitive, positive, negative, affective, semantic, or conceptual. Priming effects involve word recognition, semantic processing, attention, unconscious processing, and many other issues, and are related to differences in various writing systems. How quickly this effect occurs is contested; some researchers claim that priming effects are almost instantaneous.
Processing fluency is the ease with which information is processed. Perceptual fluency is the ease of processing stimuli based on manipulations to perceptual quality. Retrieval fluency is the ease with which information can be retrieved from memory.
In psychology, the misattribution of memory or source misattribution is the misidentification of the origin of a memory by the person making the memory recall. Misattribution is likely to occur when individuals are unable to monitor and control the influence of their attitudes, toward their judgments, at the time of retrieval. Misattribution is divided into three components: cryptomnesia, false memories, and source confusion. It was originally noted as one of Daniel Schacter's seven sins of memory.
The encoding specificity principle is the general principle that matching the encoding contexts of information at recall assists in the retrieval of episodic memories. It provides a framework for understanding how the conditions present while encoding information relate to memory and recall of that information.
Retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) is a memory phenomenon where remembering causes forgetting of other information in memory. The phenomenon was first demonstrated in 1994, although the concept of RIF has been previously discussed in the context of retrieval inhibition.
The rhyme-as-reason effect, also known as the Eaton–Rosen phenomenon, is a cognitive bias where sayings or aphorisms are perceived as more accurate or truthful when they rhyme.
Larry L. Jacoby was an American cognitive psychologist specializing in research on human memory. He was particularly known for his work on the interplay of consciously controlled versus more automatic influences of memory.
Associative interference is a cognitive theory established on the concept of associative learning, which suggests that the brain links related elements. When one element is stimulated, its associates can also be activated. The most known study demonstrating the credibility of this concept was Pavlov's experiment in 1927 which was later developed into the learning procedure known as classical conditioning.