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Two experiments examined age-related differences in memory for bizarre and common pictures. In Experiment 1, a facilitative effect of bizarreness was obtained for young adults and one of the older groups, but not for the oldest group (over age 70). However, the bizarreness effect was found for even the oldest group when predominantly common lists were used in Experiment 2. It is concluded that older adults suffer from deficits in distinctive processing, but those deficits can be reduced by providing a more uniformly common context in which differences can be processed.

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We examined recognition memory for relational and contextual details of bizarre and common acts that were either self-performed or performed by another. The results support previous findings that bizarreness disrupts memory for relational details and provide evidence that bizarreness also disrupts memory of the general context in which objects of actions occurred. The disruptive effects of bizarreness were found in memory for both self-performed and other-performed acts. Although parts of bizarre events are remembered well, information about the context in which the remembered part occurs and relationships among remembered parts are not remembered well.