Verbatim Effect
The observation that the "gist" of what someone has said is better remembered than the verbatim wording.
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Origin
The verbatim effect is central to Fuzzy-Trace Theory (FTT), proposed by cognitive psychologists Valerie F. Reyna and Charles Brainerd in the early 1990s. FTT distinguishes between verbatim memory traces (surface details) and gist traces (semantic meaning), demonstrating that verbatim traces decay faster than gist traces over time. This dual-process theory explained previously puzzling findings in memory research, showing that true memory decays while false memory increases as verbatim details fade but gist remains accessible.
Updated February 22, 2026