Role of response imagery on stimulus recognition*

This experiment investigated the role of response imagery on recognition of stimulus terms following associative training. Ss learned to associate 12 high-imagery or low-imagery responses with trigram stimuli by the study-associative matching procedure. Half the pairs were consistently paired and half were re-paired anew on each trial. Following associative training, Ss were given a stimulus recognition and an associative matching task The results indicated that the probability of stimulus recognition, given correct associative matching, was greater when the responses were high-imagery rather than low-imagery. In contrast, no rehable response imagery effects were found for the probability of stimulus recognition, given incorrect associative matching. It was argued that the locus of the response imagery effect was primarily during retrieval rather than during encoding.