Effect of caption meaning on memory for nonsense figures

Abstract

Recognition and recall of simple nonsense figures were investigated. Five different relations between captions and figures were tested: no caption, physically descriptive, abstract, meaningful, and humorous. Thirty nonsense figures were presented with captions of a particular relation followed by an additional 30 figures that required the subjects to generate the same type of captions. Following distraction, the subjects attempted to recall and draw all 60 figures. Fifteen of the first thirty figures that had supplied captions were then tested for recognition without their captions. Recall of figures with supplied humorous captions was best and abstract captions resulted in poorest recall. For generated captions, meaningful and no caption conditions were best recalled and descriptive captions were worst. This interaction between source of caption and type of meaning indicates that certain information such as humor can be relatively more helpful if supplied than if generated. Recognition was better for recalled figures but without an interaction with caption meaning or error type. Thus, in the present study, the captions served as retrieval cues without significantly influencing memory for the figure itself.