![]() You are driving in your car and a song comes on the radio that you haven’t heard in at least 10 years, but you sing along, recalling every word. Now let’s turn our attention to acoustic encoding. High-imagery words are encoded both visually and semantically (Paivio, 1986), thus building a stronger memory. On the other hand, abstract words like level, truth, and value are low-imagery words. When you read the words car, dog, and book you created images of these things in your mind. Why is this? Because you can recall images (mental pictures) more easily than words alone. ![]() If you were asked later to recall the words from this list, which ones do you think you’d most likely remember? You would probably have an easier time recalling the words car, dog, and book, and a more difficult time recalling the words level, truth, and value. To see how visual encoding works, read over this list of words: car, level, dog, truth, book, value. ![]() Visual encoding is the encoding of images, and acoustic encoding is the encoding of sounds, words in particular. When they were asked to remember the words, they tended to recall them in categories, showing that they paid attention to the meanings of the words as they learned them. The 60 words were actually divided into 4 categories of meaning, although the participants did not know this because the words were randomly presented. It was first demonstrated by William Bousfield (1935) in an experiment in which he asked people to memorize words. The encoding of words and their meaning is known as semantic encoding. Material is far better encoded when you make it meaningful. You can see that the sentences are now much more memorable because each of the sentences was placed in context. Next count backwards from 40 by fours, then check yourself to see how well you recalled the sentences this time. Now, try writing them again, using the following prompts: bagpipe, ship christening, and parachutist. How well did you do? By themselves, the statements that you wrote down were most likely confusing and difficult for you to recall.
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