The fate of originally presented surface information following recall errors in sentence memory tasks

Pictures are remembered better than their names. This picture superiority effect in episodic memory has been attributed either to the greater sensory distinctiveness of pictures or to their greater conceptual distinctiveness. Weldon and Coyote (1996) tested the conceptual distinctiveness hypothesis by comparing how well pictures as opposed to words primed in two conceptual implicit memory tasks (category production and word association). They found no picture superiority in priming and concluded that the basis of the picture superiority effect must then be pictures' greater sensory distinctiveness. Using the same logic, we compared how well pictures as opposed to words primed in a perceptual implicit memory task (picture and word fragment identification). The sensory distinctiveness theory would predict that pictures should prime picture fragment identification better than words prime word fragment identification, a result we call the picture superiority in within-form priming. Across three experiments which manipulated the encoding task at study, only one showed picture superiority in within-form priming. In contrast, in all three experiments there was robust picture superiority in recall, and exposure to pictures and words at study and test produced independent effects in which both study and test exposure to pictures was more effective for recall than exposure to words. We consider how these results might be reconciled by differences in retrieval demands between recall and fragment identification.