Imagery Mnemonic Instructions

One of the reasons for the revival of interest in mental imagery was the experimental demonstration of the effectiveness of instructions to subjects to use mental imagery in their learning. The efficacy of such instructions had in fact been known more generally for a very long time. Various techniques prescribed for orators in Greek and Roman times included the use of mental imagery explicitly (see Paivio, 1971c, chap. 6; Yates, 1966), and these techniques survive essentially unchanged in the present day in courses of memory improvement. In this chapter, I shall discuss experimental evidence on the effects of imagery mnemonic instructions and its implications for theories of human memory.