Imagery and contextual organization

Three experiments explore the contribution of a shared imaginal context to associative memory for pairs of items imaged interactively or separately. The major result is that an imagined context only contributes to association between items that share the context if the items are imagined as interacting with the context. Therefore, interaction effects do not reflect the contaminating influence of a shared context. Rather, context effects themselves obey the same relational principles that interaction effects in general do. The results are presented as support for the organization-redintegration hypothesis as an account of imaginal interaction.