FURTHER CONSTRAINTS ON THE BIZARRENESS EFFECT - ELABORATION AT ENCODING

In this study, we attempted to determine why the mnemonic benefit of b izarreness is not found with the use of complex sentences (i.e., those containing additional modifiers of nouns) as stimuli. Several explana tions were investigated, including the idea that complexity reduces th e imageability of the sentence and the idea that complexity itself is mnemonically beneficial. The results of four experiments favored the l atter explanation. We suggest that the cues associated with the comple xity of the sentence provide more effective or salient retrieval cues than do those associated with sentence bizarreness. Consequently, the mnemonic benefit of bizarreness appears to occur only with relatively impoverished encoding contexts (e.g., simple, unelaborated sentences).