A variety of sex differences in spatial cognitive performance have been documented. However, factors other than those specifically related to gender and cognition per se, such as the perceived spatial character of given tasks, may contribute to such differences. In the present experiments, spatial memory and mental image rotation tasks were presented to female and male adults. The task formats or instructions were varied to emphasize or deemphasize the spatial character of the tasks. Highly “spatial” instructions or format significantly depressed performance on spatial tasks for women but not for men. “Nonspatial” instructions or format, within which the spatial character of the task was not explicit, resulted in no significant differences between the performances of women and men on either type of task. These findings indicate that instructional or format effects relating to the purported “spatial” character of a given task may significantly influence the relative performance of women and men.
Research on mental imagery has demonstrated the importance of visual imagery to recall performance. Little attention, however, has been paid to the mnemonic value of auditory imagery. The present experiments addressed the influence of auditory and visual imagery on free recall. Characteristic sounds, pictures, or printed verbal labels of 40 common items were presented sequentially to adult subjects, who were asked to recall them after a 2-min retention interval. Pictures and characteristic sounds were associated with significantly better recall than were verbal labels alone, indicating that auditory imagery has mnemonic value similar to that of visual imagery. This effect was confirmed by further experiments. However, the effects of auditory and visual imagery on free recall were not shown to be additive.
Recent research has demonstrated that auditory and visual information have similar mnemonic properties. The relative influence of verbal, auditory, and visual stimulus materials on the primacy effect in free recall was studied. Significant primacy effects were obtained when either verbal or auditory-input stimuli were presented. However, primacy effects were suppressed when pictorial materials were used, principally because of elevation of recall for midlist and later elements. Instructions to use visual mental imagery at encoding suppressed primacy effects for verbal materials, but not for auditory materials, indicating that although auditory information processing is probably similar to phonological processing within working memory, auditory processing may share cognitive resources with visuospatial processing. Results are shown to be predictable and interpretable within the item-specific/relational information distinction of Hunt and Einstein (e.g., 1981), and within the working-memory theory of Baddeley (e.g., 1986).
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