The Impact Of Gains And Losses On The Pictorial Superiority Effect

The pictorial superiority effect which was well received has demonstrated that subjects are more likely to remember items if they are presented as pictures versus words. Previous studies which stand at perceptual processing and conceptual processing have explained it. Firstly, it it has been suggested that pictures benefit from greater conceptual processing than do words (Stenberg,2007). On the other hand, research(Lloyd,2007) have showed that when people recognize pictures, they could use the distinctiveness heuristic which is a diagnostic monitoring strategy to avoiding false recognition. So there may be a pictorial superiority effect on metamemory. And studies suggested that the value-directed remembering(positive or negative points) have impacts on conceptual encoding(Castel,2007) which is essential to make pictorial memory better. Experiment 1 explored the stability of the pictorial superiority effect in self-paced learning conditions and using Eye-link ? to record the eye-tracking data. Participants studied picture and word which presented randomly at right or left on each screen for twenty trials. After recognition, they made retrospective confidence judgment(RCJ). The result suggests that the picture superiority effect exists stably in self-paced condition, no matter in memory index or eye tracking index.Secondly, studies suggested that the value-directed remembering have impacts on some memory phenomenon, such as, the own-race bias and the false memory effect. Similarly, in this study we speculated that the importance, or value may also inspire people to increase cognitive investment of word then reduce or eliminate the pictorial superiority effect and we explore how people monitoring and control when processing pictures and word in the self-paced learning conditions. By setting words different importance contrast conditions(bounding the gains and losses together by ask participant recall correctly to gain 5 points, otherwise will loss 5 points, as the same time the picture gains and losses 1 point), it can triggers different levels of motivation. Experiment 2 further explore the effect of gains and losses on the pictorial superiority effect. The results showed that the pictorial superiority effect disappeared when the gains was higher and losses influenced the ability of monitoring and controlling. The experiment 3 duplicated the research result of experiment 2.To sum up, with the increase of gains, the the pictorial superiority effect was eliminated and even reversed, no matter in recognition or study time. The losses have effect on word monitoring and control.