Analysis of a Mnemonic Device: Modern psychology uncovers the powerful components of an ancient system for improving memory

60 (-.10) .44 (-.26) .70 Dual processing systems The evidence indicates that "imag ery" effects in memory are not con sonant with a strictly verbal encoding view. The viewpoint that currently holds sway (for instance, Atwood 1969 ; Bower in press; Paivio 1969) is that nonverbal imagery and verbal sym bolic processes are the two major components of thinking. These com ponents are distinguished by several properties. First, the imagery system is relatively more attuned to the task of representing and operating on concrete information, whereas the verbal system appears better suited for processing abstract information. Second, visual imagery has many of the properties of a spatially parallel system, whereas verbal processes are better suited for handling sequential, serial information. For example, if items (pictures or words) are shown serially one by one at a very fast rate (say, five items per second), the person can later freely recall or recognize more pictures than words, but his reconstructed serial order of the items is better when the items are words than when they are pictures (Paivio 1969). We may think of the verbal and imagery systems as being richly inter connected. It is these interconnections that enable us to label pictures and sensory information generally and that enable imagery to be aroused by semantic interpretations placed on words or sentences. In this latter re gard, we may recognize individual differences in the extent of the verbal to-imaginal interconnections, as well as differences in the frequency of using imagery for interpreting lan