Previous studies investigated different kinds of mental images with reference to vividness, generation, maintenance times and recall. The present study focuses on the distinction between general and specific mental images and examines the time required for generating the images of concrete nouns as well as their recall under different task conditions. Results show that the generation time of general images are shorter than that of specific ones. Processes underlying the generation of general images appear different from the processes involved either in the retrieval of the concepts associated with the nouns or in the generation of more specific images.
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