Strategy choice and the effect of field independence on abstraction, storage, and retrieval

Abstract

Subjects were presented a concept identification (CI) task in which stimuli were varied on four dimensions descriptive of people. Half of the stimuli contained names and pictures of well-known people exemplifying the descriptive dimensions. Upon completion of the CI problem, subjects were given a surprise recognition memory task for CI stimuli in which they had to discriminate between old and new stimuli differentiated only by the exemplars that accompanied verbal descriptions. Subjects were scored for the degree to which they accessed stimuli with pictorial exemplars faster than those without them in the recognition task. For subjects whose latencies were not influenced by the pictorial variable, efficiency in CI and accuracy of recognition were positively related to scores on the embedded figures test. It was concluded that field articulation was related to superior ability to process information in a working memory when an analytic processing strategy is used.