Abstract
The spontaneous use of imagery and its relationship to free verbal recall were investigated. Community college students read a 2,100-word story under one of three sets of instructions and then recalled the story and reported their images immediately and 48 hours later. A new methodology for classifying imagery reports was developed. Results indicated that separate categories of imagery reports and verbal recalls were not highly correlated. Principal components analysis yielded factors predominated by imagery variables. Further, whereas total verbal recall declined over the retention interval (i.e., forgetting), imagery did not. Experimental instructions to readers designed to manipulate processing depth in an externally valid fashion did not result in significant differences in imagery reporting and recall, suggesting that a strict levels of processing view may be untenable for ecologically valid reading situations. Other results indicated that a significant relationship existed between imaging a story segment and the story grammar macro-structure of that segment, and that imagery of the climactic event was the most common. This study contributes to a series of studies using various texts and methodologies that suggest that imagery is a distinctive aspect of reading, viable for study in its own right.