IMAGERY AND RECOGNITION
Peter E. Morris, R. Lowell Reid · British Journal of Psychology · 1974
Subjects who were instructed to form images, and control subjects, were allowed an average of 3 sec./word in Expt. I and 6 sec./word in Expt. II to study a mixed list of 50 high I and 50 low I nouns. Recognition was tested upon a list containing the old words mixed with an equal number of new high I and low I nouns. Analysis of total errors showed that high I nouns were recognized better than low I nouns and that instructions to form images improved the recognition of high I nouns. Instructions to form images improved the recognition of old high I nouns, but did not reduce the number of false positives. However, high I value was associated with fewer false positives, but not with better recognition of old words. It is suggested that better recognition following instructions to image is the result of images actually elicited but that better recognition of high I than of low I nouns results from a greater semantic similarity among low I than among high I words.