The Von Restoff effect (named after Hedwig von Restorff), also called the isolation effect, predicts that an item that "stands out like a sore thumb" (called distinctive encoding) will be more likely to be remembered than other items.
For instance, if you see a list of items on a shopping list, if one item is written in bright green and the others are not, you may be more likely to remember that one item.
This distinctiveness may come in the form of humor, in which case the humor effect is incurred. Similarly, specific examples may also include the bizarreness effect and the serial position effect.
References
Von Restorff, H. (1933). Uber die Wirkung von Bereichsbildungen im Spurenfeld (The effects of field formation in the trace field). Psychologie Forschung, 18, 299-34.
The notion of isolationeffects, which is closely related to, but distinct from the well known concept of mental accounting (Thaler, 1980, 1999), suggests that when given a multi-dimensional problem, people tend to disaggregate dimensions of the problem and focus on only those components that they control most directly or that affect them most directly.
Thus, the insensitivity of subjects to formatting effects in experiments like the control treatment suggests a methodological implication rather than a policy one: given sufficient task length or complexity, isolationeffects may be anticipated almost trivially.
Isolationeffects are also distinguishable from the well documented tendency for individuals to value inordinately that which they think they own.
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