SEARCHING FOR TARGET LETTERS IN MEMORY - INDIVIDUAL PREFERENCES AND INSTRUCTIONS FOR TEXT REPRESENTATION

Participants searched for target letters in a short passage held in me mory. In Experiment 1, participants were divided into two groups on th e basis of a retrospective report concerning the type of representatio n used to store the passage in memory, and in Experiment 2, participan ts were instructed concerning the form of memory representation to use , Only participants using a visual representation missed more targets in the word the than in other words. Participants instructed to form a visual representation also made fewer content-word or phrase substitu tions when learning the passage than did participants instructed to fo rm an auditory representation. These findings show that choice of memo ry representation is flexible and that the representation used influen ces what can be retrieved from memory.