Abstract
Three experiments examined recognition and recall of items that people imagined as being invisible. When one item hid another, the hidden item suffered in recognition, but so did the one that remained visible; the demand to imagine items invisibly made both items less recognizable than in control conditions. Cued recall did not depend on whether the visible item or the invisible item was the cue, but it did depend on whether the initial task required relational processing of the items. When both items were invisible in a dark imaginary scene, there was a general loss in all measures of memory, including memory for the scene. None of the results requires recourse to the “out of sight, out of mind” principle that memory depends on the visual characteristics of images. The results attest, instead, to the importance of the informational characteristics of memorial records.
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This research was supported by Grant A8122 from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to Ian Begg. The data were collected in two independent studies courses by Maryann Azzarello, supervised by Ian Begg. The paper was written while Ian Begg was on sabbatical leave at Erindale College of the University of Toronto.
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Begg, I., Azzarello, M. Recognition and recall of invisible objects. Memory & Cognition 16, 327–336 (1988). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03197043
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03197043