No abstract

30 female Ss who had been tested for recall and recognition of social and neutral words that were presented incidentally were administered a group form of the Embedded Figures Test. Both recall and recognition of social words were found to be significantly related to field dependence. No such relationship was found for neutral words. Although field-dependent Ss performed significantly more poorly on the focal task than field-independent Ss, recall and recognition was independent of performance on the focal task. It was also found that field-dependent Ss were able to recall more social visual incidental material than neutral visual incidental material.

In 2 experiments, field-dependent Ss showed better incidental memory for social words, while field-independent Ss showed an even division between recall of social and neutral words and a selective preference in recognition for neutral words.