Bizarre imagery, interference, and distinctiveness.

Abstract

Previous studies have shown that bizarre and common images produce equivalent levels of recall in unmixed-list designs. Using unmixed lists, we tested the view that bizarre images would be less susceptible than common images to common sources of interference. In all experiments, subjects imaged a list of either bizarre or common sentences and then performed some kind of interfering task before recalling the initial list of sentences. Experiment 1 showed that bizarre images were better accessed than common images after imaging an intervening list of common sentences. Also, components of common images tended to be better recalled than those of bizarre images after imaging an intervening list of bizarre sentences. Experiments 2a and 2b showed that interfering tasks consisting of studying lists of common concrete nouns did not differentially affect memory for bizarre and common images. In Experiment 3, labeling and imaging an interfering list of common pictures produced higher recall of bizarre images. Generally, bizarre images appeared to be less susceptible than common images to interference from certain types of common encodings. Importantly, the superior recall of bizarre images was always due to greater image (sentence) access, whereas higher recall of common images was associated with greater recovery of the image (sentence) constituents. Explanation of the precise pattern of results requires consideration of the distinctive properties of bizarre images.

An introduction to Bayesian hierarchical models with an application in the theory of signal detection

“…Consider the bizarre memory example above. Although Riefer and Rouder (1992) used aggregation to conclude that bizarre sentences are better recalled than common ones, the basic finding has been obtained repeatedly (see, e.g., Einstein, McDaniel, & Lackey, 1989;Hirshman, Whelley, & Palij, 1989;Pra Baldi, de Beni, Cornoldi, & Cavedon, 1985;Wollen & Cox, 1981), so it is surely not the result of a Type I error. Oft-replicated phenomena, such as the Stroop effect and semantic priming effects, are certainly not spurious.…”

The Isolation, Primacy, and Recency Effects Predicted by an Adaptive LTD/LTP Threshold in Postsynaptic Cells

“…The isolated item can be made different from the surrounding context in a variety of ways (for a review, see Schmidt, 1991): by a physical difference, for example, one word printed in red and the other words printed in black (Wallace, 1965); by a conceptual difference, for example, the word car embedded in a list of various flower names (Hunt & Mitchell, 1982); by showing nude pictures in a series of more typical magazine pictures (Ellis, Detterman, Runcie, McCarver, & Craig, 1971); by consistency or inconsistency with the subjects' schema, for example, whether an ashtray is seen either in a preschool classroom or in an office (Pezdek, Whetstone, Reynolds, Askari, & Dougherty, 1989); by predictability, for example, a single word that was either predictable or not predicable from the a preceding text (O'Brian & Myers, 1985); by words rated as more distinctive than words rated as not distinctive (Hunt & Elliot, 1980); by bizarre versus nonbizarre imagery (Einstein, McDaniel, & Lackey, 1989); and so on, where the isolated, deviating, or different condition is better recalled or remembered than the corresponding nonisolated condition.…”

Training Procedures for Enhancing Reserve Component Learning, Retention, and Transfer

“…Use of bizarre images as mnemonics aids long-term retention (Andreoff & Yarmey, 1976;Einstein, McDaniel, & Lackey, 1989) but does not improve shortterm retention over and above that found when common images are used (Nappe & Wollen, 1973;Senter & Hoffman, 1976).…”