The fan effect is most often demonstrated in recognition memory. Participants studied 26 facts about people in locations. Over this set of materials, either 1, 2, or 3 facts were studied about each person and location. The term 'fan' refers to the number of facts associated with a particular concept. After committing this material to memory, participants were tested in a paradigm in which they had to recognize sentences they had studied (targets) and to reject foil sentences which were novel combinations of the same people and locations (foils). Both the target and the foil probes could be classified according to number of facts associated with the person and the location. The data from Anderson (1974) shows that latency increased as the concepts were associated with more facts.