distinctiveness effect
the finding that people tend to have superior memory for odd or unusual information. The most cited example is the von Restorff effect, originally proposed in 1933 by German psychologist Hedwig von Restorff (1906–1962). Also called the isolation effect or Restorff phenomenon, it refers specifically to superior memory for isolated items. For instance, if most of the words in a list are printed in blue ink, one word printed in red will be better remembered than the blue words; the isolated item is odd only with respect to its immediate context—that is, it is the only member of a category (because it is printed in a different color than the other items in the list). By contrast, other types of distinctiveness effects occur when an item is distinct with respect to general knowledge. They include, among others, the bizarreness effect (superior memory for offbeat images or sentences as compared to common images or sentences) and
the orthographic distinctiveness effect (superior memory for words with unusual letter combinations, as in subpoena, compared to words with more typical letter combinations, as in bookcase).