The Anti-picture Superiority Effect In Blurred Pictures And Characters In Recognition Memory

The fact that pictures generally better remembered than words is called the picture superiority effect. It has strong support in explicit memory research but the lack of implicit superiority effect, so the present study represents a return to explicit tasks such as recognition. Recent memory research has come to theorize that the picture superiority effect variously ascribed to a perceptual or conceptual processing advantage. However, it may be influenced by experimental materials, original or blurred, words or Chinese characters.Using blurred pictures and characters as experimental materials, this study aimed to assess their differences of explicit recognition on each fragmental level. With the assumption of their memory something linked to their activation levels, the study meant to make clear questions, whether the pictures got better memory than Chinese characters, whether the anti-picture superiority effect would occur, or what the reason of the picture superiority effect was, something like that.Experiment 1 was a pilot study to explore the picture superiority effect on the original level andfragmental level 6. Experiment 2 adopted the crossover paradigm to estimate furthermore theexplicit differences of pictures and characters. Experiment 3 disentangled perceptual and conceptual contribution to test for memory differences of pictures and characters on level 5 and 4. Over threeexperiments, the results indicate that:1. On the original level, pictures are better recognized than characters. There is picture superiority and in perceptual memory. On the fragmental level 6, the opposite situation suggests that the anti-picture superiority effect occurred.2. On the fragmental level 6, the anti-picture superiority effect could be ascribed to perceptual processing advantage. On the fragmental level 5 and 4, there is still anti-picture superiority which perceptual or conceptual processing makes indiscriminatingly contributions to.3. Memory for fragments is affected by their activation levels. The higher level, the better recognition.4. The activation levels could work on the differences between memory of blurred pictures and characters, but can't overturn the anti-picture superiority.5. The picture superiority has few connections with subjects' response bias. Taking one with another, decision criterion of pictures has a loose tendency while characters strict...