The Verbatim Effect: People Remember Gist Better Than Details

The Verbatim Effect varies in its influence on people and may or may not occur in situations, as it depends on several factors like:

• The individual's preferences, abilities, and experience.
• The type of information, along with the reason for interacting with the information. A meaningless piece of information will not have any verbatim effect on an individual.

Two ways by which the verbatim effect can benefit us:

• It makes us understand what information we can easily remember and what we can forget.
• It makes us learn more effectively.

Remembering the gist of the information leads to better outcomes than the 'rote' way in which we mug up the information without understanding.

The Influence on others happens in several ways:

• Understanding the Verbatim Effect can help us present the information in a tailored way, facilitating retention in others, using repetition or highlighting.
• This can also help us make people remember the tiny details, leading to avoidance of common misunderstandings.
• It can help us trim our presentations, removing all the information that we know won't be remembered by the audience anyway.