Imagery and long-term retention

Improving Comprehension for Jury Instructions

“…In tasks where subjects were asked to recall a previously presented list, the results were the same, recall being better for concrete words in both short-term and long-term tasks (Duker & Bastian, 1966;Stoke, 1929;Winnick & Kresse!, 1965). If we equate concrete words with those that can be easily visualized (Paivio, Yuille, & Madigan, 1968, found a correlation of .83 between the two) several other researchers have also found that visualization enhances recall (Begg & Robertson, 1973;Bowers, 1931Bowers, , 1932Foth, 1973;Gupton & Frincke, 1970;Tulving, McNulty, & Ozier, 1963). Yuille and Paivio (1969) presented subjects with varying levels of concrete passages to read and asked them to recall the words used in the passages.…”

Memory Structures and Learning Outcomes

“…Presumably such effects would be interpreted by Rohwer (1973) as arising from "antagonistic prompts." More recent studies by Begg and his associates (Begg, 1972;Begg & Robertson, 1973) suggested that imagery may be effective in the retention of connected discourse because it can be integrated into complex semantic units, including those that are complex semantic images. A conflicting in terpretation was offered by Thorndyke (1975), who found that imagery had a definite effect on recall of verbs but did not serve to integrate sentences into holistic units.…”

Contextual imagery in meaning and memory

“…Second, highly imageable senses of words lead to higher recall levels than do less imageable senses of the same words. Finally, the memory difference in free recall probably represents a conservative test of imagery effects, since the largest effects due to imagery are observed in cued recall (e.g., Begg, 1972Begg, , 1973Begg & Robertson, 1973;Bower, 1970), especially when the imagery values of the cues are varied (e.g., Lockhart, 1969;Paivio, 1969;Philipchalk & Begg, 1971).…”