Effect of imposed vs. self-generated imagery and sentence mediation on the free recall of retarded adolescents.

The effectiveness of verbal and imaginal elaborations on the free recall of institutionalized EMR adolescents was investigated. Fifty subjects were assigned to one of five conditions: experimenter-imposed verbalization, experimenter-imposed imagery, subject-generated verbalization, subject-generated imagery, and control. The subjects saw 15 pictures, presented in sets of 3, for five trial bloks, and were asked to recall the 15 pictures after each trial block. Over all trials combined, it was found that recall in the experimenter-imposed verbalization and the experimenter-imposed imagery conditions was reliably superior to recall in the control and subject-generated verbalization conditions. Although retarded adolescents were capable of producing verbal or imaginal elaborations, as evidenced by post-experimental inquiry, elaborations facilitated recall only when they were supplied by the experimenter.