The Supposed Effect of Interactive Imagery in Paired Associate Learning

Previous experiments designed to investigate the effects of interactive imagery in paired associate learning have included the confounded variable of intralist similarity: Images of objects interacting have corresponded to pairs with different connectives, and images of independent objects have corresponded to pairs with the same connective (the conjunction “and”). For the “different” group of our first experiment, the members of the different pairs were linked by different connectives, most of which denoted an action. For the “same” group, the members were linked by the same connective, usually one denoting an action. For the “and” group, the members were linked by the connective “and”. Cued recall by the “different” group was superior to that of the other two groups. Recall by the “same” and “and” groups did not differ. Within the “different” group, recall of “and” pairs did not differ from the recall of “action” pairs with which they had been mixed. In a second experiment, subjects were required to match the members of a pair. Analogous results were obtained. Overall, the findings imply that recall effects that have previously been interpreted as being a result of interactive imagery may be the result merely of variations in intralist similarity.

Meaningfulness and Intralist Similarity in Rote Memorization

The study examined the effect of meaningfulness and intralist similarity on serial anticipation learning by 24 volunteers who were given trigram lists to be learned by oral serial anticipation. A sign test performed on total scores for serial anticipation was significant. It was concluded that the lower the intralist similarity and the higher the meaningfulness, the faster the learning.

Interaction Effects of Synonymity, Intralist Synonym Cohesiveness, and List Length in Multi-Trial Free Recall

In each of three experiments, different lists of synonymous and minimally related adjectives were presented to groups of subjects for multi-trial free recall. The results in Exp. 1 supported the hypothesized interaction of synonymity and list length on recall and organization, predicting impaired performance on long lists of synonyms. Two partial replications (Exps. 2 and 3) obtained negative results. In Exp. 4 five measures of semantic cohesiveness were employed to verify the presence of a high degree of semantic similarity in the three experimental lists of synonymous adjectives. It was concluded that list synonymity has a differential effect primarily on the retrieval strategies employed and that subjects are still able to achieve optimal recall and organization with lists of high intralist similarity.

Effects of Discrimination Pretraining upon Intralist Similarity Phenomenon in Developing Beginning Reading Skills

The present study investigated the effects of discrimination pretraining upon the intralist-similarity phenomenon in developing beginning reading skills. The response measures included rate of learning, amount of word recognition, and amount of word generalization. The findings showed that the high intralist-similarity groups required more learning trials but demonstrated greater word-recognition skills than the low intralist-similarity groups regardless of whether or not pretraining was used. Discrimination pretraining did, however, increase the rate of learning in beginning reading.

Subprocesses of, and Rated Similarity in, Paired-Associate Learning

Examination was made of a proposal by Underwood, Ekstrand, and Keppel (1965) concerning the effects of the various subprocesses that are assumed jointly to determine paired-associate learning. Runquist's (1968a, 1968b, 1969) recently presented distinction between formal and rated similarity was evaluated. Only minimal support was found for the Underwood, et al. predictions which involve the paired-associate learning subprocesses of response-learning and associative interference where formal similarity is concerned. Further, the use of rated similarity as a ratio-scale measure on intralist similarity appears to furnish a definition of formal similarity which is more rigorous than the manner by which it has been traditionally ordinally scaled.

Effect of Ego-Involvement Instructions and Intralist Similarity on Stimulus Generalization Errors in Paired-Associate Learning

To assess the effect of motivation and list characteristics on verbal learning performance, 60 Ss in a 3 × 2 factorial design learned paired associates consisting of CVC as stimuli and digits as responses, in lists of high or low formal intralist similarity and under high, low, or control Ego-involvement (E-I) conditions. No significant differences in errors were found as a function of ego involvement. The increase of errors with high formal intralist similarity was specific to the effect of stimulus generalization and did not represent an over-all increase in list difficulty: no significant differences were found between lists for non-generalization errors but significant list differences were found for stimulus-generalization intrusions ( p < .01).