Imagery and cued recall: Concreteness or context?

Investigated, in a cued-recall study, 2 hypotheses regarding the recall of noun triplets through the use of imagery. An extension of A. Paivio's conceptual-peg hypothesis (1963, 1965) for paired-associate learning predicted that the concreteness of the cue word would be the critical factor in determining recall, while a constructive approach to imagery predicted that retrieval of the context used to construct the image would be the essential element. 64 undergraduate Ss formed images for 20 noun triplets with corresponding contexts and were later presented with 1 member of each triplet and asked to recall the other 2 members. The elicitation of the context was the single factor determining recall, while concreteness had no consistent effect. Implications of the results for the processes involved in remembering through imaging are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).