Effects of Image-arousal and Aid for Integration on Incidental Memory

Two experiments were carried out to investigate the combined effects of imagearousal and aid for integration on incidental memory. The experiments involved orienting task in incidental memory paradigms. In Experiment I, 37 subjects were asked to rate the semantic congruity of each target with its sentence frame followed by free recall, recognition and cued recall tests. Each target was referred to have been elaborated when the word in its sentence frame was hit in recognition test. Sentences with an associate of each elaborated target had led to better cued recall performance than those without an associate when these sentences were incongruous, whereas the difference between the two sentences was not observed when they were congruous. This result was interpreted as showing the effect of aid for integrating targets into cognitive structure on incidental memory. But the effect of image-arousal was not observed. In Experiment II, 37 subjects were asked to rate the vividness of image aroused by each target and its sentence frame. Sentences with an associate of each elaborated target had led to better cued recall performance than those without an associate at both case of semantic congruity. This result showed the effect of the aid for integrating targets into cognitive structure on incidental memory. As in Experiment I, the effect of image-arousal was not observed. Both experiments did not show the combined effect of image-arousal and aid for integration on incidental memory. These results were interpreted as showing that the image-arousal was less effective than the aid for integration in incidental memory