Subjects who were given imagery instruction prior to receiving the stimulus material required significantly more time to learn the material. The additional time indicates imagery use. The instructed subjects also had significantly faster retrieval time on a recognition posttest. Thus, there is an inverse relationship between learning time and retrieval time for imaged information. The posttest scores of the instructed subjects were not significantly higher than the uninstructed subjects. The two groups also had similar perceptions of their use of mental imagery. Mental imagery is proposed as a technique to help reduce the speed-accuracy tradeoff during performance. Imagery needs to be investigated further as a type of task-specific processing, since it involves deeper information processing than other cognitive strategies.
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