The fan effect first appeared in a series of experiments conducted by John R. Anderson, a cognitive psychologist, in 1974.[2] The three experiments he conducted involved participants learning 26 sentences that paired a person with a location. Additionally, they were asked to determine whether or not a particular sentence that was given to them belonged to the 26 they were asked to study. An example of a sentence Anderson used in his experiment was: "A hippie is in the park."