Long-term effectiveness of imagery instructions with retarded persons.

The effects of imagery instructions on paired-associate learning efficiency and on the retention of 16 picture pairs were investigated using two groups of EMR individuals with approximate mental ages of 8 and 11 years, respectively. While facilitated list mastery was obtained under imagery instructions, no facilitation was found for 1-week retention performance. However, in learning a new list immediately following the retention task, those individuals who had received imagery instructions during original learning continued to exhibit facilitated learning. These results extend previous work.