Memory Biases

The Von Restorff effect is the tendency to remember items that stand out from their surroundings more than items that blend in.

The positivity effect is the tendency, especially in older adults, to remember and focus more on positive than negative information.

The Google effect is the tendency to forget information that we know can be easily looked up online, while remembering how to access it.

Nostalgia bias is the tendency to view the past, especially one's own past, with longing and affection, often idealizing it while ignoring negative aspects.

Rosy retrospection is the psychological phenomenon of people sometimes judging the past disproportionately more positively than they judge the present.

The telescoping effect is a temporal displacement of an event whereby people perceive recent events as being more remote than they are and distant events as being more recent than they are.

Remembering our past beliefs as more similar to current ones.

Incorporating misleading information into memory.

False memory refers to the phenomenon of confidently recalling events that did not happen or remembering them differently from how they occurred.

Cryptomnesia is the phenomenon of mistakenly believing that a remembered idea is original, forgetting that it came from someone else.

Source confusion is the tendency to remember information while misattributing where it came from, blending memories of different sources or contexts.

The misinformation effect occurs when a person’s memory of an event is altered by post-event information, such as leading questions or misleading details.

Inattentional blindness is the failure to notice a visible but unexpected object or event because attention is focused elsewhere.

Change blindness is the failure to notice large changes in a visual scene when they occur during a brief disruption or distraction.

Attentional bias is the tendency for our attention to be drawn more strongly to certain types of stimuli—such as threats, rewards, or concerns—shaping what we notice, think about, and remember.

Selective perception is the tendency to notice, interpret, and remember information that fits our expectations or goals while overlooking or downplaying conflicting information.

Choice-supportive bias is the tendency to remember our past choices as better than they were and to exaggerate the positives of chosen options while downplaying their negatives.

Hindsight bias is the tendency to see past events as having been more predictable than they actually were, believing "I knew it all along" after the outcome is known.