Jm. Ruizvargas et al., THE EFFECTS OF CONCRETENESS ON MEMORY - DUAL CODES OR DUAL PROCESSING, European journal of cognitive psychology, 8(1), 1996, pp. 45-72
This research examined the relative importance of encoding and retriev
al contexts to the demonstration of concreteness effects in memory. Pr
edictions from relational-distinctive and dual-code positions were eva
luated. In the first two experiments, concreteness and recall task (fr
ee recall or cued recall) were manipulated following a relational sema
ntic orienting task. The results showed an interaction between concret
eness and recall type only when distinctive information could be acces
sed both within and between pairs. The third experiment showed that co
ncreteness effects appeared under a relational, non-semantic orienting
task. In the fourth experiment, we reexamined the magnitude of the co
ncreteness effect following semantic versus non-semantic tasks and rel
ational versus item-specific processing. Overall, the findings were in
consistent with both dual code theory and distinctive-relational view
accounts of concreteness effects. An alternative ''bidirectionality hy
pothesis'' is suggested.