Effect of reference-field organization on verbal memory.

Abstract

Verbal memory was investigated using two miniature artificial languages that were identical except for the design of their reference system. One reference field was illustrated as a set of continuous elements, the other as a holistic unit. Those subjects trained on the holistic field were superior on a number of tasks involving associational memory, although they were significantly poorer on a paired-associate task which necessitated a breaking up of the perceptual units on which they had been trained. It was suggested that the semantic memory system was organized in terms of units formed on the basis of both linguistic and referential information.Under a variety of conditions, perceptual unitization has been shown to facilitate recall on paired-associate tasks. Both Bower (1970) and Begg (1973) found that subjects instructed to form integrated images of verbal pairs were superior on a cued-recall task to subjects instructed to form independent images for each word. A number of studies (e.g., Davidson, 1964;Epstein, Rock, & Zuckerman, 1960;Horowitz, Lampel, & Takanishi, 1969) have shown that superior recall occurs when visual stimuli are presented as object pairs forming a meaningful unit (a HAND in a BOWL) as opposed to pairs in which the objects are illustrated as separate units (a HAND and a BOWL). Similarly, integrated geometrical designs are more effective stimuli than nonintegrated designs (Asch, 1969;Asch, Ceraso, & Heimer, 1960), and nonsense syllables and words pronounced as a fused unit more effective than those pronounced as two units (Arnold & Bower, 1972;Asch, 1969). Such research demonstrates the importance of perceptual organization in memory association tasks.