Abstract
The purpose of this experiment was to compare free recall for pictorial and for image-mediated verbal stimuli. Five independent groups were tested. One received a set of 30 noun-verb-noun sentences and instructions for rote rehearsal; one received the same 30 trigrams and instructions to construct visual images; a third was asked simply to look at drawings portraying incidents suggested by the trigrams; the fourth group received Items 1-15 in the form of trigrams and Items 16-30 as pictures to be passively observed; for the fifth group, the trigram-picture sequence was reversed. Stimuli were presented only once. Presentation was followed by a 5-min distraction task, and then all subjects were asked to write down as many as they could remember of the names of the objects of the events depicted by the pictures and sentences (the third word in each trigram). There is some indication in the results that even passively observed pictures were recalled better–if only slightly better–than image-mediated words. This suggests that the multiple cues available in pictures are a better aid to recall than the processes of controlled imagery. However, a more important implication, drawn from the performance of the fourth group, is that a better approach to facilitating recall is to combine the advantages of each into a single strategy and to elaborate images from pictorial stimuli.
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This experiment was part of a program of independent study conducted by J. N. Feuer under the direction of W. Bevan.
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Bevan, W., Feuer, J.N. The facilitative role of imagery in episodic memory: Multiple cues or active construction?. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 10, 172–174 (1977). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03329314
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03329314