Investigating the colour bizarreness effect in long-term memory

Past research has found substantial evidence of enhanced memory for objects and events that are highly incongruent with individuals' prior expectations. This well-known bizarreness effect, was recently extended into the domain of colour, revealing enhanced memory for objects paired with expectation-incongruent colours (or bizarre - e.g., blue carrot) relative to expectation-congruent colours (e.g., orange carrots; Morita & Kambara, 2022). Colour bizarreness effects in object memory: Evidence from a recall test and eye tracking.. In two experiments, we explored whether the enhanced memory for bizarre, expectation-incongruent objects includes object-<i>feature</i> memory and whether this feature memory persists long-term. Using a 4-Alternative recognition task, we assessed memory for object colours as a function of expectation-congruence immediately following study and three days later. Results of Study 1 revealed no significant difference in recognition memory for bizarre compared to expectation-congruent colours, and no enhanced memory for bizarre colours in long-term memory. In Study 2, we found that an encoding task requiring participants to activate their prior expectations during study did not promote greater retention of bizarre object features. Instead, the results across both studies revealed a long-term memory advantage for expectation-congruent items. These findings highlight conditions where the enhanced memory for bizarre information is limited, providing an interesting challenge to current mechanistic accounts of memory for expectation-related information.