Information Transformation During Processing Of Picture

The picture superiority effect is that the learned pictures are more likely to berecalled on the subsequent free recall test or recognition memory test than the words. Several distinct theoretical accounts of the picture superiority effect have been proposed. People have not reached an agreement on the issue that whether the processing of the picture encoding is subject to influence from articulation. Twenty-two subjects were tested in a 2×2×4 completely within-subject design. The independent variables were the articulation (suppression, non-suppression), the static characteristics (shape, color) and the form of stimuli (picture-picture, picture-word, word-picture, word-word). The goal of the present study is to investigate the mechanisms underlying the picture superiority effect and to understand whether the processing of the picture encoding is subject to influence from articulation by assessing the behavioral responses and eye movements during recognition. The finding is consistent with the distinctiveness account, which attributes the picture superiority effect to distinctive features of the picture itself. And the results support the view that articulation plays an important role in the processing of the picture. Another interesting finding is that recognition performance for shape is better than color. Moreover, the result of the present study provide an experimental evidence for the multi-component model of working memory which proposed by Alan Baddeley.