Imagery and Verbal Processes - Introduction
Imagery and Verbal Processes - Introduction
Verbal Processes
V p Psychology Press
X Taylor & Francis Croup
New York London
To my wife Kathleen
and my children Sandra, Anna Lee, Heather, Eric, and Karina
First Published by
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers
365 Broadway
Hillsdale, New Jersey 07642
Publisher's Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint
but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent.
Preface
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii
fulness in free and serial recall. Journal of Experimental Psychology. 1969, 79, 509-514.
Copyright 1969 by the American Psychological Association, and reproduced by permission.
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to recall than words? Psychonomic Science, 1968, II, 137-138.
Figure 7.14. From Paivio, A., & Smythe, P. C. Word imagery, frequency, and meaning-
fulness in short-term memory. Psychonomic Science, 1971, 22, 333-335.
Figure 7.15. From Wickens, D. D., & Clark, S. Osgood dimensions as an encoding class
in short-term memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1968, 78, 580-584. Copyright
1968 by the American Psychological Association, and reproduced by permission.
Figures 7.16 and 7.17. From Paivio, A., & Csapo, K. Concrete-image and verbal memory
codes. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1969, 80, 279-285. Copyright 1969 by the
American Psychological Association, and reproduced by permission.
Figures 8.3 and 11.1. From Paivio, A., Smythe, P. C., & Yuille, J. C. Imagery versus
meaningfulness of nouns in paired-associate learning. Canadian Journal of Psychology,
1968, 22, 427-441.
Figure 8.6. From Paivio, A., and Madigan, S. A. Imagery and association value in
paired-associate learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1968, 76, 35-39. Copyright
1968 by the American Psychological Association, and reproduced by permission.
Figure 8.7. From Yuille, J. c., Paivio, A., & Lambert, W. E. Noun and adjective imagery
and order in paired-associate learning by French and English subjects. Canadian Journal
of Psychology, 1969, 23, 459-466.
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Figure 9.1. From Kiess, H. O. Effects of natural language mediators on short-term
memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1968, 77, 7-13. Copyright 1968 by the
American Psychological Association, and reproduced by permission.
Figure 9.2. From Bower, G. H., & Clark, M. C. Narrative stories as mediators for serial
learning. Psychonomic Science, 1969, 14, 181-182.
Figure 10.1. Reprinted with permission of author and publisher: From Smith, R. K., &
Noble, C. E. Effects of a mnemonic technique applied to verbal learning and memory.
Perceptual and Motor Skills, 1965, 21, 123-134.
Figure 10.2. From Senter, R. J., & Hauser, G. K. An experimental study of a mnemonic
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Figure 10.4. From Bugelski, B. R. Images as mediators in one-trial paired-associate
learning. II: Self-timing in successive lists. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1968,
77, 328-334. Copyright 1968 by the American Psychological Association, and reproduced
by permission.
Figure 10.6. From Paivio, A. Effects of imagery instructions and concreteness of
memory pegs in a mnemonic system. Proceedings of the 76th Annual Convention of the
American Psychological Association, 1968, 77-78. Copyright 1968 by the American
Psychological Association, and reproduced by permission.
Figure 11.2. From Yuille, J. c., & Paivio, A. Latency of imaginal and verbal mediators
as a function of stimulus and response concreteness-imagery. Journal of Experimental
Psychology, 1967, 75, 540-544. Copyright 1967 by the American Psychological Associa-
tion, and reproduced by permission.
Figure 11.4. From Yuille, J. C., & Paivio, A. Imagery and verbal mediation instructions
in paired-associate learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1968, 78, 436-441. Copy-
right 1968 by the American Psychological Association, and reproduced by permission.
Figures 11.5 and 11.6. From Paivio, A., and Yuille, J. C. Changes in associative strategies
and paired-associate learning over trials as a function of word imagery and type of
learning set. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1969, 79, 458-463. Copyright 1969 by
the American Psychological Association, and reproduced by permission.
Figure 11.7. From Paivio, A., & Foth, D. Imaginal and verbal mediators and noun
concreteness in paired-associate learning: The elusive interaction. Journal of Verbal
Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1970, 9, 384-390.
Figure 11.12. Epstein, W., Rock, I., & Zuckerman, C. B. Meaning and familiarity in
associative learning. Psychological Monographs, 1960, 74 (4, Whole No. 491). Copyright
1960 by the American Psychological Association, and reproduced by permission.
Figure 12.2. From Katz, J. J., & Fodor, J. A. The structure of a semantic theory.
Language, 1963, 39, 170-210. Copyright 1963 by the Linguistic Society of America.
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Figure 12.3. From Miller, G. A., & Isard, S. Some perceptual consequences of linguistic
rules. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1963, 2, 217-228.
Figure 13.3. From Reynolds, J. H. Cognitive transfer in verbal learning: II. Transfer
effects after prefamiliarization with integrated versus partially integrated verbal· perceptual
structures. Journal of Educational Psychology, 1968, 59, 133-138. Copyright 1968 by the
American Psychological Association, and reproduced by permission.
Figure 13.4. From Sachs, J. S. Recognition memory for syntactic and semantic aspects
of connected discourse. Perception and Psychophysics, 1967, 2, 437-442.
Figure 13.5. From Begg, I., & Paivio, A. Concreteness and imagery in sentence meaning.
Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1969, 8, 821-827.
Figure 13.6. From Paivio, A. Imagery and deep structure in the recall of English nominali·
zations. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1971, 10, 1-12.
Figure 14.4. From Pettifor, J. L. The role of language in the development of abstract
thinking: A comparison of hard·of·hearing and normal·hearing children on levels of
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Excerpts from Frances A. Yates, The art of memory (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), pp. 2, 4, 6-8, 9-10, 22, 24-25, 35-36.
Copyright 1966 by the University of Chicago Press. Reprinted by permission of the
publishers.
Contents
1
INTRODUCTION, I
2
DEVELOPMENT AND FUNCTIONS OF THE
SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS, II
3
MEANING AND THE SYMBOLIC PROCESSES, 39
4
PERCEPTION AND THE SYMBOLIC
PROCESSES: Effects of Meaning, 87
5
PERCEPTION AND THE EXPERIMENTAL
AROUSAL OF THE SYMBOLIC PROCESSES, 119
ix
x CONTENTS
6
LEARNING AND MEMORY: Classical
Mnemonic Systems, 153
7
STIMULUS ATTRIBUTES AND MEMORY, 177
8
MEANING AND ASSOCIATIVE LEARNING, 245
9
VERBAL MEDIATION IN LEARNING AND
MEMORY, 299
10
IMAGERY MEDIATION IN LEARNING AND
MEMORY, 327
11
DISTINGUISHING IMAGINAL AND VERBAL
MEDIATORS, 353
12
LANGUAGE AND THE SYMBOLIC
PROCESSES: Linguistic Models and
Associationism, 393
13
IMAGERY AND LANGUAGE, 433
CONTENTS xi
14
INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN SYMBOLIC
HABITS AND SKILLS, 477
15
EXTENSIONS AND SPECULATIONS, 525
REFERENCES, 535
NAME INDEX, 581
SUBJECT INDEX, 590
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1
Introduction
The logical argument The current attitude toward imagery and the rea-
sons for it have been summarized recently by Deese (1965) in reference to
association and language. The arguments apply generally to the phenomena
being considered here and, because they express a rather general viewpoint,
they merit careful consideration. Thus:
With that the empirical superiority of words over images ends, for implicit
verbal processes are no less inferential than perceptual images. One might argue
that it is more direct and, therefore, more parsimonious to infer a verbal medi-
ating process when the response is verbal, but this follows only if one assumes
a one-to-one relation between the overt associative reaction and the mental
process that caused it. Such an assumption would be unsound, for one can
respond verbally to pictures as well as to words and so, by analogy, one's verbal
response could just as logically be mediated by a "mental picture" as by "men-
tal words" (that is, implicit verbal representations). Both are pure inferences
and which one it is more logical to infer in research concerned with such prob-
lems depends on the total set of conditions in a given study, not merely on the
mode of the overt response. The problem is empirical as well as logical, and
it is the experimenter's burden to devise conditions that will permit him to make
reasonable inferences about the nature of the effective underlying processes
independent of their particular behavioral expression.
Revival of the image Perhaps partly for the reasons just discussed and
partly because the concept is somehow a valid reflection of mental processes,
Watson's attack did not succeed in burying "the image." Research concerned
explicitly with mental imagery continued to appear sporadically in psychological
literature even during the most arid period in the 1920s and thirties, and the
classical problems associated with imagery continued to be discussed in influ-
ential textbooks of the day (e.g., Woodworth, 1938). In addition, concepts with
essentially the same functional properties as imagery turned up in behavioristic
writings. Perhaps the most obvious example is Tolman's (e.g., 1932, 1948)
cognitive approach to behavior theory, in which such terms as expectancy,
sign learning, and cognitive maps substituted for the various functions that had
been attributed earlier to mental images. Hull's (1931) fractional anticipatory
goal response (rg-sg) mechanism and Osgood's (1953) elaboration of it under
the label of representational mediation process are functionally parallel to Tol-
man's sign-Gestalt-expectation and, on close inspection, all of the concepts can
be seen to retain some of the cognitive flavor of the imagery concept. Perhaps
this was only to be expected. As pointed out by Morgan (1943) and Hebb
( 1949), mental variables have been repeatedly thrown out because there was
no place for them in stimulus-response psychology, but they repeatedly find their
way in again in one form or another because they are necessary to a full account
of behavior.
Thus it is not surprising that we find the concept of imagery reappearing
essentially in its pristine form but with its respectability enhanced by a behavior-
istic cloak. On the basis of results from experimental investigation involving
a classical conditioning paradigm, Leuba (1940) felt justified in referring to
images as conditioned sensations. Skinner (1953) similarly discussed visual
imagery as "conditioned seeing." The possibility has even been suggested that
Introduction 7
print. Imagery, like all inferential concepts, can have functional significance
only to the extent that it can be differentiated from other concepts theoretically,
and to the extent that these distinctive theoretical properties are open to em-
pirical test. It is essential, therefore, to compare and contrast the concept of
imagery with other concepts that have distinct theoretical properties and at
the same time can be distinguished operationally from imagery. Within the
limitations of present knowledge, this is the approach followed in the present
volume, the aim of which is to compare and contrast the roles of imagery and
of verbal symbolic processes in relation to a variety of psychological phenomena.