A multinomial modeling analysis of the mnemonic benefits of bizarre imagery

• Published in: Memory & cognition Vol. 20; no. 6; pp. 601 - 611
• Main Authors: Riefer, David M., Rouder, Jeffrey N.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Austin, TX Psychonomic Society 01.11.1992; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Adult; Aided Recall; Attention; Biological and medical sciences; Cognition & reasoning; Cognitive Processes; Experiments; Female; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Humans; Imagery; Imagination; Learning. Memory; Male; Memory; Mental Recall; Models, Statistical; Nouns; Paired-Associate Learning; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Retention (Psychology); Social research; Unaided Recall; Human; Mental imagery; Free recall; Mental representation; Memory; Information storage; Cognition; Models; Mnemonic retrieval; Experimental study; Performance; Cued recall
• ISSN: 0090-502X; 1532-5946
• DOI: 10.3758/BF03202710

A series of experiments was conducted to explore the cognitive processes that mediate the bizarreness effect, that is, the finding that bizarre or unusual imagery is recalled better than common imagery. In all experiments, subjects were presented with noun pairs that were embedded within bizarre or common sentences in a mixed-list design. None of the experiments produced a bizarreness effect for cued recall; however, for two of the experiments, the bizarre noun pairs were remembered significantly better than the common pairs for free recall. To determine if these differences were due to the storage or retrieval of the items, a multinomial model for the analysis of imagery mediation in paired-associate learning was developed and applied to the data from the experiments. The model revealed that bizarre sentences benefited the retrieval of the noun pairs but not their storage within memory. The empirical and modeling results are discussed relative to previous findings and theories on the bizarreness effect.