Impacts of humor and relevance on the remembering of lecture details

Although much previous research has been conducted on remembering humorous materials, only a few studies have examined how visual humorous examples relevant to lecture content enhance the recall and/or recognition of the lecture details. In addition, previous studies have produced conflicting results and have methodological limitations. The present study investigated the interactions between humor and relevance in recall and recognition performance. One hundred sixty five subjects were given humorous or serious video examples which were relevant or irrelevant to lecture materials. Recognition performance, but not recall performance, was better when examples were humorous and relevant to the lecture materials. These results indicate that use of humorous relevant video examples is helpful for recognizing details supplemented by the examples.