Mental imagery helps eight-year-olds remember what they read.

Abstract

In order to determine if 8-year-olds can use mental imagery to improve their memory of prose they read, experimental subjects were given practice constructing mental images of progressively longer prose passages (sentences, paragraphs, and a short story) and were shown examples of good images. Controls were exposed to the prose material, but did not practice constructing mental images. Experimental subjects read 17 segments of a short story and constructed a mental image for each segment after reading the segment. Control subjects read the same story segments and were instructed to "do whatever you can or have to" in order to remember the story. Experimental subjects answered significantly more short-answer questions about the story than controls did. Since ancient Greece, visual imagery has been recognized as a powerful aid to memory (Yates, 1966). Moreover, despite behaviorist attacks on the construct of mental imagery, researchers throughout this century found that performance on a variety of memory tasks was improved when subjects generated imaginal representations of the to-be-remembered material (Paivio, 1971). It is only recently, however, that researchers have explored the effect of instructions to form mental images on children's memory performance. In general, imagery facilitates__ch^ldren's learning on,Jbasic_^memory tasks (Levin, 1976), such as paired-associate