Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A well-known phenomenon of memory is the bizarreness effect which refers to enhanced memory for objects that are highly incongruent with people’s prior expectations. This phenomenon was recently extended into the visual domain of color, showing enhanced memory for objects paired with expectation-incongruent (or bizarre) colors. Here, we explore whether the enhanced memory for bizarre/expectation-incongruent objects extends to memory for the object-color binding and whether this binding is well-preserved long-term. Using a 4-Alternative forced choice task, we assessed memory for object colors as a function of expectation-congruency on one day and 3 days later. Our results revealed no significant difference in recognition memory for bizarre colors compared to expectation-congruent colors, and no enhanced memory for bizarre colors in long-term memory. These findings highlight conditions where the enhanced memory for expectation-incongruent information is limited, providing an interesting challenge to current mechanistic accounts of memory for expectation-related information.