The Recency Illusion: Seeing Something Spacewide

Have you bought a car or maybe rented a car? Have you ever noticed that you seem to see more of that model of car than before? Did everybody just buy it when you did? It turns out, as always, your brain is tricking you. It is known by many names, including but not limited to, the Recency illusion, the Frequency Illusion and the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. As much as I would like to mention the research and experiments that Baader and Meinhof did, the name was not dedicated to two scientists. The story is that the name showed up on an internet forum, as one user reported that he kept seeing references to the Baader-Meinhof Group (a German left-wing terrorist organization active in the 1970s) after hearing about them for the first time. This term stuck, and this illusion is still called the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon to this day. This happens because of two psychological concepts: Selective Attention and Confirmation Bias. Selective attention, in simple terms, is the idea that the brain, after seeing something new, starts focusing on that thing, making it more likely to encounter that thing again. A simple example is your name. When you are talking to someone, and the room is noisy, you will still hear and turn when you hear someone say your name even though you heard none of their conversation before that. It is commonly referred to as the Cocktail Party Effect. Anyway, the second piece to this ‘puzzle’ is Confirmation Bias. Confirmation bias is the brain searching for information that matches your previous experiences and prioritizing that information, and because you now notice it more often, it seems unusually often. 

You don’t see everything your eye sees; you see what the brain wants you to see.