FAILURE TO FIND THE PICTURE SUPERIORITY EFFECT IN IMPLICIT CONCEPTUALMEMORY TESTS

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.