The Effect of Imagery on Recall

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The Effect of Imagery on Recall

Introduction:

In cognitive psychology there are many ways in which people can

enhance memory - mnemonics. This study is based on how imagery helps

memory. Imagery is the use of mental representations of real life

objects and action. This only takes place in the mind and is not

physically present.

There are examples of tests that have taken place to see how effective

mnemonics using imagery are:

Wollen et al. in 1972 carried out an experiment using paired images

and manipulating them to be interacting or not interacting e.g. a

cigar on a piano. The images were also presented as bizarre e.g. a

cigar smoking from both ends. The independent variables of this

experiment were the conditions that the images were in. They were: i)

interacting and bizarre ii) interacting but not bizarre iii) not

interacting but bizarre, and finally iv) not interacting and not

bizarre. The results of the study were that the interacting pairs were

recalled more often than the non-interacting pairs. However,

bizarreness did not affect the results of recall.

Besides being used for recollection, the use of imagery for teaching

languages is significantly effective, as shown by Atkinson & Raugh

(1975). The technique used is the key-word method where an image is

used to help recall another word. When teaching the foreign language

to the participants in the experiment, the participants were told to

find a part of the foreign word which sounds like an English word. For

example: in Spanish, the word lagartija means lizard. In English, the

word would be broken down and read as "log-ar -tee-ja". The high

imagery word would be 'log' and so it would be used as the key to

recall the definition. Participants of this experiment would then have

been told to imagine a lizard lying on top of a log. Like this, the

stored image would help retrieve the actual meaning of the word*.

The method of Loci is useful for recalling objects by visualizing a

location.

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