Aging, imagery, and the bizarreness effect

Abstract

This study examined the bizarre imagery effect in young and older adults, under incidental and intentional conditions. Intentionality was manipulated across experiments, with participants receiving an incidental free recall test in Experiment 1 and an intentional test in Experiment 2. This study also examined the relation between working memory resources and the bizarreness effect. In Experiment 1 young and older adults were presented with common and bizarre sentences; they later received an incidental recall test. There were no age differences in sensitivity to the bizarreness effect in Experiment 1 when ANOVAs were used to analyze the data. However, when the bizarreness effect was examined in terms of effect size, there was evidence that younger adults produced larger bizarreness effect sizes than younger adults. Experiment 2 further explored age differences in sensitivity to the bizarreness effect by presenting young and older adults with bizarre and common sentences under intentional learning conditions. Experiment 2 failed to yield age differences as a function of item type (bizarre vs. common). In addition, Experiment 2 failed to yield significant evidence that the bizarreness effect is modulated by working memory resources. The results of this study are most consistent with the distinctiveness account of the bizarreness effect.

Investigating secondary‐distinctiveness‐based effects in aging and Alzheimer's disease patients

“…The designing of memory aids for older adults and more specifically for cognitively impaired persons like Alzheimer disease patients (AD patients), is a highly active field of research (Plancher, Tirard, Gyselinck, Nicolas & Piolino, 2012). However, although it is known that events that are distinctive with regard to stored knowledge in memory are more easily recall, this memory phenomenon which is generally termed secondary distinctiveness, has only recently been investigated in older adults (Black, McCown, Lookadoo et al, 2012;Nicolas & Gounden, 2010;Nicolas & Worthen, 2009) and not at all in AD patients.…”

“…As mentioned previously, it is only recently that secondary distinctiveness-based effects have been investigated in relation to aging (Black et al, 2012;Gounden & Nicolas, 2012b;Nicolas & Gounden, 2010;Nicolas & Worthen, 2009). In their study, Nicolas and Worthen (2009) studied the bizarreness effect in three age groups: younger adults, older adults (mean age 65.5 years old) and old-old adults (mean age 76.1 years old).…”

“…The study by Nicolas and Worthen (2009) thus suggests that the bizarreness effect disappears (Experiment 1) or is reduced in aging (Experiment 2). More recently, Black et al (2012) examined the bizarreness effect as a function of age by using verbal materials (sentences) instead of images. The findings of their study also showed that the size of the bizarreness effect is reduced in aging when bizarreness is operationalized with the imagery of common and bizarre sentences.…”

The bizarreness effect and visual imagery: No impact of concurrent visuo-spatial distractor tasks indicates little role for visual imagery.

“…The goal of the current project was to assess the role of visual imagery in the emergence of the bizarreness effect. There are different variants of the visual-imagery hypothesis, but the general idea is that when participants generate images for both common and bizarre items the images for the bizarre items are visually more distinctive (e.g., Black et al, 2012; Campos et al, 2009; Geraci et al, 2013; McDaniel & Einstein, 1986) or require more transformations in their creation that leads to better encoding for these items and, therefore, greater recall (e.g., Marshall et al, 1979; Wollen & Margres, 1987; see Worthen, 2006, for review). More generally, both ancient and modern writers propose that bizarre imagery enhances memory, and that the result is a bizarre imagery effect (e.g., Black et al, 2012; Burns, 1996; Buzan, 1991; Campos et al, 2008, 2009; Cornoldi et al, 1988; Dalgleish et al, 2013; Lorayne, 2010; Matzen et al, 2016; McDaniel & Einstein, 1986; Yates, 1966).…”

Predicting plant attractiveness to pollinators with passive crowdsourcing

“…the availability of photographic equipment and Internet access in a given region, the local cultural precedence for collecting images of organisms and sharing them on the Internet, the time of year people are most likely to use leisure time to photograph insects or flowers). Additionally, citizen scientists are more likely to document rare events [ 27 ], possibly due to cognitive biases associated with the recall of unusual occurrences [ 22 , 51 ]. Comparing the results of searches to experimental results is essential to develop an understanding of which interactions are captured in images and which are not.…”