Perceptual blurring and recognition memory: A desirable difficulty effect revealed

Recent research in the area of desirable difficulty--defined as processing difficulty at either encoding or retrieval that improves long-term retention--has demonstrated that perceptually blurring an item makes processing less fluent, but does not improve remembering (Yue et al., 2013). This result led us to examine more closely perceptual blurring as a potential desirable difficulty. In Experiment 1, better recognition of blurry than clear …