An experiment to see the effect of imagery on recall

Unit 3

Psychology Coursework

An experiment to see the effect of imagery on recall.

Introduction:

In cognitive psychology there are many ways in which people can enhance memory - mnemonics. This study is based on how imagery helps memory. Imagery is the use of mental representations of real life objects and action. This only takes place in the mind and is not physically present.

There are examples of tests that have taken place to see how effective mnemonics using imagery are:

Wollen et al. in 1972 carried out an experiment using paired images and manipulating them to be interacting or not interacting e.g. a cigar on a piano. The images were also presented as bizarre e.g. a cigar smoking from both ends. The independent variables of this experiment were the conditions that the images were in. They were: i) interacting and bizarre ii) interacting but not bizarre iii) not interacting but bizarre, and finally iv) not interacting and not bizarre. The results of the study were that the interacting pairs were recalled more often than the non-interacting pairs. However, bizarreness did not affect the results of recall.

Besides being used for recollection, the use of imagery for teaching languages is significantly effective, as shown by Atkinson & Raugh (1975). The technique used is the key-word method where an image is used to help recall another word. When teaching the foreign language to the participants in the experiment, the participants were told to find a part of the foreign word which sounds like an English word. For example: in Spanish, the word lagartija means lizard. In English, the word would be broken down and read as "log-ar -tee-ja". The high imagery word would be 'log' and so it would be used as the key to recall the definition. Participants of this experiment would then have been told to imagine a lizard lying on top of a log. Like this, the stored image would help retrieve the actual meaning of the word*.

The method of Loci is useful for recalling objects by visualizing a location. Bower summarized this technique as: firstly memorizing a list of locations in a follow-through order, then assigning an image, representing the word to be memorized, to each location. To recall the words you will need to mentally walk through the locations mapped out and recall the items in order. Groninger (1971) proved the usefulness of this technique by using two groups of participants under different conditions. The participants in one condition were told to memorize a list of 25 words using the method of loci, and the control group participants were told to memorize 25 words using any method they wanted. Being told not to rehearse the words any further, the participants were called back 5 weeks later to recall the words and, according to results, participants using the method of Loci recalled twice as many words as the control group.

Bower and Winzenz (1970) carried out a study concerned with memory improvement, where participants were told to memorize a list of paired concrete nouns. The participants were put under four different conditions to memorize the words: rehearse the words by repeating the pairs over and over in their head, ii) to rehearse sentences provided by the experimenters, that included the both words from the pair, iii) creating sentences that included the words from the pair, and iv) using imagery, where participants were instructed to construct mental images of the paired words interacting in some way. From the results, the group ...