Personal-interactive mental imagery and short-term memory recall for words

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of two imaginal methods on a short-term memory task. A previously unresearched technique, Personalistic (P) mental imagery was combined with Interactive (I) imagery to form Personal-Interactive (P-I) mental imagery. Subjects in the P-I group were instructed to visualize themselves personally involved in an interactive scene of three given nouns. The effects of this group were compared to the effects of I imagery on a short-term memory task requiring free recall of 22 noun triads. A t test analysis found no significant difference between the I and P-I groups on total number of words correctly recalled and total number of failures to generate an image. It was concluded that the added dimension of P to I imagery did not produce greater recall than I imagery independently. It was recommended that P mental imagery be tested independently on a recall task of one word or item as opposed to two or more.