Kinetic and static imagery in sentence memory

This experiment investigates the possibility that two different kinds of imagery codes are used in sentence memory, one involving moving images (kinetic imagery) and the other involving stationary images (static imagery). Using a modality-specific interference task it was shown that only sentences involving kinetic imagery were affected by the visual interference task; neither static nor low imagery sentences were so affected. The results are interpreted as showing that some kind of imaginal code is used in memory, but that there are different kinds of code available. It is claimed that this result is inconsistent both with Paivio's (1971) ‘dual-coding’ hypothesis and with propositional accounts of sentence memory.