Hedwig von Restorff

Hedwig von Restorff attended the University of Berlin where she would also obtain her PhD. Von Restorff studied and practiced psychology according to Gestalt traditions. During her psychological career, von Restorff worked at the University of Berlin as a postdoctoral assistant to Wolfgang Köhler. During her time at the University of Berlin, von Restorff published two papers. The first touched on her findings of the isolation paradigm experiments ran in 1933, while the second was co-authored with Köhler. Her writings have never been published in English which has caused some work to be lost due to secondary accounts.

Hedwig von Restorff used the isolation paradigm in the experiments included in her 1933 paper. Her use of the isolation paradigm was to further investigate interference effects. Despite criticism towards the use of nonsense syllables growing in the psychological society at this time, von Restorff dedicated the first page of her published paper to defending her choice in the usage of them. Over her study, von Restorff presented her participants with three lists of items over a span of three days. On the first day, the items on the list were all unrelated and consisted of five different types of materials, ending with eight pairs total. Half of the pairs consisted of nonsense syllables (homogeneous pairs), while the other half represented the other four types of materials (numbers, words, letters, symbols). On the next two days, participants were given lists that contained an isolated item among homogeneous items. The isolated item occurred in either the second or third position on the list. Participants were given specific memory instructions and tested on their recall of the items they were shown.

Hedwig von Restorff (14 December 1906, Berlin – 6 July 1962, Freiburg im Breisgau) is best known for her discovery of the isolation effect that bears her name.