Recall of ‘counterintuitive’ concepts: the effect of pre-training, presentation, and normality of concepts

The successful learning, spread, and retention of counterintuitive concepts depends on many variables. This experiment was a complex design with two types of variables: (1) intrinsic memorability of concepts according to structure, and (2) type of advance training/context. Every participant was exposed to three types of concepts, each consisting of one noun and two adjectives: (1) intuitive (all normal), (2) minimally counterintuitive (one adjective is breach, one normal), (3) maximally counterintuitive (both adjectives are breach). Concepts were mixed into a set of five complicated sentences, which participants were asked to memorise. Shortly after, they were asked to recall as much information as possible. Here, we report seven different conditions. Two training conditions (story-writing and recitation) produced superior recall of the more difficult-to-learn concepts. The role of format was also found to be very important (concepts embedded in a narrative were recalled much better than concepts presented in isolation).