Hypermnesia for pictures but not for concrete or abstract words

Abstract

Subjects were presented with pictures, concrete nouns, or abstract nouns for a single learning trial followed by three forced recall trials. Performance was found to improve with repeated recall for pictures (hypermnesic effect) but not for words. Memory of pictures was superior to recall of concrete nouns, which in turn was superior to recall of abstract nouns. The results are interpreted as supporting an hypothesis that qualitative differences in imagery, and not the dual encoding theory, account for the picture superiority effect. The dual encoding theory, however, can and does predict differences in word abstractness/concreteness recall. © 1976, The Psychonomic Society, Inc.. All rights reserved.