Picture Superiority Effect Experiment

VERBAL IMAGERY

ABSTRACT

The present experiment was conducted to study the effect of word length and presence or absence of visual cues on memory. It was conducted to see whether the presence or absence of the visual cue leads to better remembrance of the words presented to the participant. Also the length of the words was taken into consideration to test the memory for the words shown to the participants. This experiment was conducted with the sample of 82 participants wherein they were presented with 4 tasks. Each participant was exposed to short and long words with no visual cues in the 1st and the 2nd task respectively. And they were exposed to long and short words with visual cues in the 3rd and the 4th task respectively. After each task

The results were such that, the participants who were presented with words-with-pictures outperformed the participants who were presented with words-before-pictures.

Picture superiority effect:

The picture superiority effect (PSE) refers to the notion that individuals remember pictures better than they remember words when their memories are tested.

The Sensory Semantic Model:

The sensory-semantic model was given by Nelson in 1979. This model states that even though pictures and words share the same semantic code, pictures are encoded more uniquely because of their more distinctive visual features. (size, colour, shape

They suggested that past demonstrations of the word length effect, the finding that words with fewer syllables are recalled better than words with more syllables, included a confound: the short words had more orthographic neighbours than the long words. They wanted to test if the neighbourhood size is a more important factor than word length. Therefore, they tested two predictions that arise out of an account that attributes word length effects to neighbourhood size rather than to length per se: (1) The neighbourhood size effect, like the word length effect, should be eliminated if subjects engage in concurrent articulation. (2) Long items with a large neighbourhood size should be recalled better than short items with a small neighbourhood size.

Word length effect:

The word length effect refers to the finding that list of short words will be recalled better than the list of long words. (Lewandowsky and Farrell, 2008)

STATEMENT OF PRPOBLEM

The statement of problem here is, ‘will the introduction of visual cues facilitate the word length effect?’

HYPOTHESIS

The hypothesis of this experiment states that there will be two main effects and one interaction effect. The main effect and the interaction effects are as under:

1. Main effect 1- The length of the words (short or long) will have significant impact on the recall score.

2. Main effect 2- The visual cues (being