LEARNING THE NAMES OF PEOPLE - THE ROLE OF IMAGE MEDIATORS

Four experiments are reported involving the effects of bizarre and com mon imagery mediation techniques on the learning and 1-week retention of surnames, given videotaped faces as cues. The videotapes contained 24 undergraduates who were photographed from about the chest up, and w ho introduced themselves at a 20-second rate. Experiment 1 showed that for both concrete and abstract names, immediate recall of the list wa s better under imagery mediation instructions than under control instr uctions. Experiment 2 studied the same conditions using immediate reco gnition memory of the list as a retrieval. measure for the names, and found, despite ceiling effects, that bizarre imagery instructions faci litated recognition for concrete names. Experiment 3 showed that immed iate recall could be improved if subjects were given an image mediator for every face-name pair as opposed to generating their own image med iators. Experiment 4 yielded three important findings: (a) 84% of the variance in the 1-week retention of initially recalled names was expla ined by the presence of absence of the original mediator during 1-week recall; (b) instructions to form image mediators facilitate recall no t because image mediators are more effective than other types of media tors, but because they increase the likelihood that a mediator will be formed; (c) 1-week retention could be enhanced with an increased focu s during encoding on the points where the mediation process is most li kely to fail. The results of these studies are discussed within the co ntext of mediation model wherein recall can fail at any of four stages .