Psychology ETDs

Publication Date

1-15-1970

Abstract

Recent research has shown that attaching relevant or descriptive verbal labels to form stimuli facilitates recognition of these forms when compared to control groups which either had no labels for the forms, or which had irrelevant, nondescriptive labels for the forms. One account of this facilitating effect asserts that relevant verbal labels aid S in relating the forms to familiar concepts. If a particular form is a positive instance of a given concept, S can encode the forms in terms of his experience with the concept. A second account of the facilitating effects of relevant verbal labels on recognition memory asserts that the unit of storage is the verbal label. As a test of these two accounts two hypotheses were formulated. First, it was hypothesized that if a form is encoded in terms of a concept, then any variable which interferes with the integrity of S’s memory for the encoding concept should also have a degrading effect upon the recognition of a form encoded in terms of that concept. In contrast, if the relevant label is the unit employed by S for storing information about visual forms, then it follows that any process which interferes wit S’s ability to recall the verbal label should also interfere with S’s ability to recognize the form associated with that label.

The present experiment was run in five stages. During Stage 1, S learned four verbal labels for form concepts. During Stage 2, S saw eight visual forms, four of which were positive instances of each of the Stage 1 concepts and labeled each of these forms with its appropriate concept name. The other four forms in Stage 2 were not related to any of the Stage 1 concepts and were assigned verbal labels that were not descriptive of them. During Stage 3, Ss were assigned to different experimental conditions. In one of these conditions (concept competition) Ss learned four new concepts designed to produce interference with the recall of the four Stage 1 concepts. The stimuli used in the interfering concept task in Stage 3 were similar in appearance to the Stage 1 concepts, but required different mediating responses than those required in Stage 1. A control condition learned four concepts during Stage 3 which were unrelated to the Stage 1 concept. In a third condition, Ss continued the Stage 2 training, but with a new set of labels which were not relevant to the forms. This procedure was designed to produce interference with S’s ability of recall the labels attached to the eight forms during Stage 2. A comparison condition continued Stage 2 training during Stage 3 with the same labels assigned to the forms in Stage 2. Other control conditions listened to tape-recorded comedy routine during Stage 3. In Stage 4, Ss were given a two-alternative forced-choice recognition task in which they were required to indicate which of two forms they had seen during Stage 2. In addition, they were required to identify the Stage form with the verbal label assigned to it during stage 2. In stage 5, Ss were tested for their ability to recall the four concepts learned in Stage 1.

The results showed that the recognition performance of Ss who learned competing concepts during stage 3 was inferior to the recognition performance of Ss who learned noncompeting concepts during Stage 3. Moreover, Ss who learned competing concepts during Stage 3 also recalled fewer of the Stage 1 concepts than Ss who did not learn competing concepts during Stage 3. A second major finding of the experiment was that Ss who learned competing labels during Stage 3 recognized as many of the Stage 2 forms as Ss who did not learn competing labels during Stage 3. It was concluded that the overall results of the experiment support the hypothesis that Ss may encode information about visual forms in terms of familiar conceptual categories. However, the results did not support the hypothesis that Ss store information about visual forms by storing the descriptive verbal labels.

Degree Name

Psychology

Level of Degree

Doctoral

Department Name

Psychology

First Committee Member (Chair)

Henry Carleton Ellis

Second Committee Member

Frank Anderson Logan

Third Committee Member

Peder Jack Johnson

Fourth Committee Member

David Wilmot Bessemer

Fifth Committee Member

David Theodore Benedetti

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

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