Item Concreteness and Spatial Location as Sources of Conflict Between Recall and Concurrent Visual Perception

Abstract

<p>The relative contributions of spatial organization and item concreteness or picturability to recall processes was investigated by attempting to induce modality-specific interference between recall and response. Subjects learned lists of items which were varied in physical or referential visual characteristics. They later signalled information about them either vocally or via a visually-guided response.</p> <p>Some ways of presenting lists for learning which are traditionally regarded as increasing reliance on mediating visual imagery were effective in generating conflict between recall and the visually-guided response; this effectiveness was limited to presentation conditions and list types which introduced spatial organization into the stimulus material. The concreteness of individual items was not useful in predicting visual conflict. Recall-response interference was eliminated by providing the subject with a response sheet which was spatially compatible with the stimulus array used during the learning phase.</p> <p>The results are interpreted in the following ways: There are circumstances under which verbal mechanisms alone cannot account for recall processes when the to-be-recalled material is a list of concrete nouns. To account for these results one needs to postulate a mechanism which shares execution and/or control capacity with the visual system. The fact that spatial organization rather than item concreteness predicts visual conflict indicates a need to distinguish between these two factors in the study of internal visual representation. In subjects' attempts to recall information, spatial location is much more easily interfered with than the internal representation of formal characteristics of single items.</p> <p>The distinction drawn between the internal representation of location and form in the thesis parallels a similar distinction that has been made with respect to visual perception in studies with humans and other vertebrate species. The results are also discussed in relation to attempts to distinguish semantic and imaginary mediators of learning on the basis of modality-specific interference.</p>