The role of detail information in the recognition of complex pictorial stimuli.
The present research investigated the relation between detail encoding and the facilition of picture recognition which results from the presentation of a cue to give additional processing to one of several study stimuli. With college students of both sexes as Ss (86 in Experiment 1; 64 in Experiment 2), overall recognition performance was found to be positively related with the ability of Ss to specify a "remembered" detail from the test stimulus. However, the improvement in retention associated with the presentation of an attentional cue was not affected by whether Ss could identify a detail. Furthermore, in the second experiment the magnitude of the attentional cuing effect was not diminished even under conditions which should have limited the ability of Ss to process specific detail information: namely, the performance of a concurrent verbal task during the presentation of the pictorial study stimuli. The results indicate that identification and rehearsal of detail information does not underlie the facilitation of recognition performance obtained when Ss are instructed to give additional processing effort to a specific pictorial stimulus.
D001288:Attention; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D005556:Form Perception; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D013067:Speech Perception; D013997:Time Factors