Ms. Weldon et Kc. Coyote, FAILURE TO FIND THE PICTURE SUPERIORITY EFFECT IN IMPLICIT CONCEPTUALMEMORY TESTS, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition, 22(3), 1996, pp. 670-686
According to the transfer appropriate processing framework (H. L. Roed
iger, M. S. Weldon, & B. A. Challis, 1989), if pictures engage more co
nceptual processing than words, then they should produce more priming
on implicit conceptual tests. Experiments 1 and 2 did not find any sig
nificant advantage of pictures on the implicit category production or
word association tests. When these tests were given as explicit cued-r
ecall tests in Experiment 3, pictures were recalled better than words,
producing a dissociation and indicating that the materials were sensi
tive to differences in picture and word processing. In Experiments 4 a
nd 5, the implicit tests showed level-of-processing effects, indicatin
g that they were sensitive to differences in conceptual processing. Th
erefore, it is hypothesized that (a) conceptual processing plays a min
or role, if any, in superior picture recall and that visual distinctiv
eness is a more important factor; and (b) distinctiveness is more impo
rtant in intentional than incidental retrieval.