Attentional bias
The tendency of perception to be affected by recurring thoughts.
RecallInertia
Category
Recall
This group reshapes memory, retrieval, salience, and retrospective interpretation.
61 biases
Biases in this category
Use these side by side before deciding which label best fits the judgment failure you are seeing.
Bizarreness effect
The tendency to remember bizarre or unusual material better than ordinary material.
RecallBaseline
Boundary extension
The tendency to remember a scene as having included more surrounding space than was actually shown.
RecallAssociation
Childhood amnesia
The retention of few memories from before the age of four.
RecallAssociation
Choice-supportive bias
The tendency to remember one's choices as better than they actually were.
RecallOutcome
Consistency bias
The tendency to remember past attitudes or behavior as more consistent with the present than they really were.
RecallAssociation
Continued influence effect
Misinformation continues to influence memory and reasoning about an event, despite the misinformation having been corrected.
RecallInertia
Contrast effect
The enhancement or reduction of a certain stimulus's perception when compared with a recently observed, contrasting object.
RecallAssociation
Cross-race effect
The tendency to distinguish faces of your own race more accurately than faces of other races.
RecallSelf-Perspective
Cryptomnesia
The tendency to mistake an old memory or borrowed idea for a new original thought.
RecallAssociation
Cue-dependent forgetting
The tendency for recall to weaken when the original context or cues are missing.
RecallAssociation
Declinism
The predisposition to view the past favorably and the future unfavorably.
RecallOutcome
Duration neglect
The neglect of the duration of an episode in determining its value.
RecallAssociation
Euphoric recall
The tendency of people to remember past experiences favorably while overlooking bad experiences associated with them.
RecallOutcome
Fading affect bias
A bias in which the emotion associated with unpleasant memories fades more quickly than the emotion associated with pleasant ones.
RecallAssociation
False memory
The tendency to mistake imagination, suggestion, or reconstruction for an actual memory.
RecallAssociation
Frequency illusion
The tendency to notice something once and then feel as if it is suddenly everywhere.
RecallBaseline
Gender differences in eyewitness memory
The tendency for witnesses to remember more detail about someone of the same gender under some conditions.
RecallSelf-Perspective
Generation effect
The tendency to remember self-generated information better than information supplied by others.
RecallSelf-Perspective
Google effect
The tendency to forget information that can be found readily online by using Internet search engines.
RecallAssociation
Hindsight bias
The tendency after an outcome is known, to see it as having been more obvious or predictable than it actually was beforehand.
RecallOutcomePostmortems & learningForecasting & planning
Humor effect
The tendency to remember humorous material more easily than comparable non-humorous material.
RecallAssociation
Implicit association
The tendency for response speed to reflect how strongly ideas are linked in memory.
RecallAssociation
Lag effect
The phenomenon whereby learning is greater when studying is spread out over time, as opposed to studying the same amount of time in a single session.
RecallAssociation
Leveling and sharpening
The tendency for memories to lose some details while exaggerating others as they are retold over time.
RecallAssociation
Levels-of-processing effect
The tendency for deeper, more meaningful encoding to produce stronger memory than shallow encoding.
RecallAssociation
List-length effect
A smaller percentage of items are remembered in a longer list, but as the length of the list increases, the absolute number of items remembered increases as well.
RecallBaseline
Memory inhibition
Being shown some items from a list makes it harder to retrieve the other items.
RecallAssociation
Misinformation effect
Memory becoming less accurate because of interference from post-event information.
RecallAssociation
Modality effect
The tendency for the last items in a list to be remembered better when heard than when read.
RecallAssociation
Mood-congruent memory bias
The improved recall of information congruent with one's current mood.
RecallAssociation
Negativity bias
The tendency to give bad news, threats, criticism, and losses more psychological weight than equally sized positives.
Opinion ReportingRecallAssociationBaselineMedia & politicsTeams & management
Next-in-line effect
The tendency to remember less of the person who spoke just before one's own turn.
RecallAssociation
Part-list cueing effect
The tendency for seeing some items from a list to make the remaining items harder to recall.
RecallAssociation
Peak–end rule
The tendency to remember an experience mainly by its peak moment and its ending.
RecallAssociation
Perky effect
The Perky effect, where real images can influence imagined images, or be misremembered as imagined rather than real.
RecallAssociation
Persistence
The tendency for traumatic memories to recur unwantedly after the event is over.
RecallAssociation
Picture superiority effect
The tendency to remember pictured information better than the same information presented only as words.
RecallAssociation
Placement bias
The tendency to remember oneself as above average at strengths and below average at weaknesses.
RecallSelf-Perspective
Positivity effect
Older adults' tendency to favor good over bad information in their memories.
RecallAssociation
Primacy effect
The tendency to remember items at the beginning of a sequence especially well.
RecallBaseline
Processing difficulty effect
The tendency to remember information better when processing it required more effort or thought.
RecallAssociation
Recency effect
A form of serial position effect where an item at the end of a list is easier to recall.
RecallBaseline
Recency illusion
The illusion that a phenomenon one has noticed only recently is itself recent.
RecallOutcome
Reminiscence bump
The recalling of more personal events from adolescence and early adulthood than personal events from other lifetime periods.
RecallAssociation
Repetition blindness
Unexpected difficulty in remembering more than one instance of a visual sequence.
RecallAssociation
Rosy retrospection
The remembering of the past as having been better than it really was.
RecallOutcome
Self-relevance effect
The tendency to remember information better when it is connected to oneself.
RecallSelf-Perspective
Serial position effect
The tendency to remember items at the beginning and end of a sequence better than those in the middle.
RecallBaseline
Social cryptomnesia
The tendency for societies to remember that change happened while forgetting who caused it and how.
RecallAssociation
Source confusion
Episodic memories are confused with other information, creating distorted memories.
RecallAssociation
Spacing effect
The tendency to remember information better when exposure is spaced out over time.
RecallAssociation
Stereotype memory bias
The tendency for memory or judgment to drift toward familiar social stereotypes.
RecallInertia
Suffix effect
Diminishment of the recency effect because a sound item is appended to the list that the subject is not required to recall.
RecallAssociation
Suggestibility
The tendency to absorb suggested details and later misremember them as one's own memory.
RecallAssociation
Telescoping effect
The tendency to displace recent events backwards in time and remote events forward in time, so that recent events appear more remote, and remote events, more recent.
RecallAssociation
Testing effect
The fact that one more easily recall information one has read by rewriting it instead of rereading it.
RecallAssociation
Tip of the tongue
The tendency to partly retrieve a memory while remaining unable to pull up the needed word or item.
RecallAssociation
Verbatim effect
The tendency to remember the gist of what was said better than the exact wording.
RecallAssociation
Von Restorff effect
The tendency to remember an item better when it stands out from its surroundings.
RecallBaseline
Zeigarnik effect
The tendency to remember unfinished or interrupted tasks better than completed ones.
RecallAssociation