Encoding: Getting Information Into Long-Term Memory • 177complex sentence creates more connections between the word to be remembered
and other things, and these other things act as cues that help us retrieve the word
when we are trying to remember it. Consider, for example, your response to each
of the sentences about the chicken. If reading them resulted in images in your mind,
which image was more vivid—a woman cooking, or a giant bird carrying a strug-
gling chicken?
Apparently, most of the participants in Craik and Tulving’s experiment found
the giant-bird sentence to be more memorable. This wasn’t true for one student in
my class, however, who reported that because her mother cooks a lot of chicken, she
thought of her mother when reading the shorter sentence. Thus, for this student, the
image of her mother cooking formed a stronger connection than the image of the
swooping bird.Forming Visual Images Gordon Bower and David Winzenz (1970) decided to test
whether using visual imagery—“images in the head” that connect words visually—can
create connections that enhance memory. They used a procedure called paired- associate
learning, in which a list of word pairs is presented. Later, the fi rst word of each pair is
presented, and the participant’s task is to remember the word it was paired with.
Bower and Winzenz presented a list of 15 pairs of nouns, such as boat–tree, to
participants for 5 seconds each. One group was told to silently repeat the pairs as
they were presented, and another group was told to form a mental picture in which
the two items were interacting. When participants were later given the fi rst word and
were asked to recall the second one for each pair, the participants who had created
images remembered more than twice as many words as the participants who had just
repeated the word pairs (● Figure 7.3).Linking Words to Yourself Another example of how memory is improved by
encoding is the self-reference effect: Memory is better if you are asked to relate
a word to yourself. T. B. Rogers and coworkers
(1977) demonstrated this by using the same pro-
cedure Craik and Tulving had used in their depth-
of-processing experiment. The design of Rogers’
experiment is shown in ● Figure 7.4a. Participants
were presented with a question for 3 seconds fol-
lowed by a brief pause and then a word. The task
was to answer the question “yes” or “no” after
seeing the word. Here are examples of the four
types of questions:- Physical characteristics of word
“Printed in small case?
Word: happy - Rhyming
“Rhymes with happy?”
Word: snappy - Meaning
“Means the same as happy?”
Word: upbeat - Self-reference
“Describes you?”
Word: happy
When Rogers then tested his participants’ recall,
he obtained the results shown in Figure 7.4b for
words that resulted in a “yes” response. Participants
were more likely to remember words that they rated
as describing themselves.Repetition
groupImagery
group10Percent correct recall0515Boat-tree
Boat-tree
Boat-tree● FIGURE 7.3 Results of the Bower
and Winzenz (1970) experiment.
Participants in the repetition group
repeated word pairs. Participants in
the imagery group formed images
representing the pairs.
Ask question.
Example:
Describes you?(a)(b)Size RhymeMeaningDescribes you?0.50.050.080.140.30
0.25Proportion “yes”responses recalled 0Answer
question.
Example:
Ye sPresent word.
Example:
Shy● FIGURE 7.4 (a) Sequence of events in Rogers et al.’s (1979) self-
reference experiment. This is the same as the design of Craik and Tulving’s
(1975) experiment shown in Figure 7.1, but some of the questions refer to
the person being tested. (b) Results of the experiment. (Source: T. B. Rogers,
N. A. Kuiper, & W. S. Kirker, “Self-Reference and the Encoding of Personal Information,” Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology, 35, 677–688, 1977.)
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