Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Andri Budzinskiy

Isolation Effect

The Isolation Effect (also known as the Von Restorff Effect) is the tendency to recall something that stands out in a group and afford it more weighting than its peers.

Items that stand out from their peers by color, shape, position, size and texture are more memorable.

Serial Position Effect

The Serial Position Effect (also know as Primacy and Recency effects) is a psychological phenomenon associated with memory. It that says that items at the beginning (primacy) and items at the end (recency) of a list or string of information are more easily recalled than items in the middle.

Graph showing the U-shaped serial position curve to the left and practical example to the right

The first item in a list is initially distinguished from previous activities as important (primacy effect) and may be transferred to long-term memory. You remember it because that is where you started.

Items at the end of the list are still in short-term memory (recency effect). You remember the end the best.

While items in the middle will suffer the worst recall. Just like on the graph: The more to the middle, the worst recall it will have.

Zeigarnik effect

The Zeigarnik Effect is the tendency to experience intrusive thoughts about an objective that was once pursued and left incomplete. The automatic system signals the conscious mind, which may be focused on new goals, that a previous activity was left incomplete.

Examples of how to make a use of Zeigarnik effect

Zeigarnik effect says that people remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks.

Picture Superiority Effect

The Picture Superiority Effect, or pictorial superiority effect refers to the phenomenon in which pictures and images are more likely to be remembered than words.

Example of Picture Superiority Effect

Experiments shown that in human memory recall, pictures outperform text dramatically. When information is presented orally, after 3 days, people will only remember 10% of it.

Category Size and Typicality Effects

The Category Size Effect says that people respond faster when the item is a member of a small category (eagle is a bird vs eagle is an animal). And the Typicality Effect says that people are faster to respond to usual or typical members. For example, when asked to name a bird an individual is much more likely to respond with robin instead of penguin.

Example of Category Size effect

Category Size and Typicality Effects in cognitive neuroscience were mainly based on several ERP studies. Both effects comes from Semantic processing which is the processing that occurs after we hear a word and encode its meaning. Semantic processing causes us to relate the word we just heard to other words with similar meanings. Once a word is perceived, it is placed in a context mentally that allows for a deeper processing.

Simon and Stroop effects

Simon Effect refers to the finding that reaction times are usually faster, and reactions are usually more accurate, when the stimulus occurs in the same relative location as the response, even if the stimulus location is irrelevant to the task. While Stroop effect occurs when a behavior or skill no longer requires direct interaction, cognitive psychologists say it is automatized.

In other words, when you first learned to tie your shoelaces, you needed to think carefully through each step of the process. Now, you probably do not even think about the steps, but simply initiate a series of movements that proceed without any further influence.

Stay tuned for Part 2

Psychology in Design (Part 1) was originally published in Prototyping: From UX to Front End on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Psychology in Design (Part 1)

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