Von Restorff effect (isolation effect)

Biological Parallel

Distinctiveness dominates memory because pattern breaks carry disproportionate survival information. Poison dart frogs evolved electric blue and yellow aposematic coloration—predators remember the distinctive pattern after one toxic encounter (98% avoidance after single trial). Monarch butterflies exploit this: their orange-black pattern stands out against vegetation, encoding 'toxic' in predator memory despite 90% of encounters being non-fatal. Peacocks and birds of paradise weaponize distinctiveness for sexual selection—females remember outlier displays (7-10x recall rate for distinctive versus average males). Search image formation in predators demonstrates the cost: birds hunting cryptic moths miss the first distinctive individual 60% of the time but detect it 95% once the search image forms. Businesses apply the same principle: Apple's 1984 Super Bowl ad aired once, became the most memorable commercial in advertising history. The isolation effect is threat-tuned salience: in a world of repetition, the different thing is either opportunity (rare fruit, novel mate) or danger (predator, toxin). Visual systems evolved to detect anomalies first.