Item and attribute storage of pictures and words in memory.

In two experiments, subjects memorized either line drawings or matching words during acquisition and then judged either pictures or words during recognition, creating four groups (picture-picture, picture-word, word-word, word-picture). The color and spatial location of the acquisition items varied, so that subjects' memory for attribute information could be assessed. The main findings were (a) subjects remembered semantic item information best, followed by spatial and then color information, (b) there was no interaction of distractor type with the format conditions, and (c) overall performance in the picture-word condition was inferior to the picture-picture condition, but word-word and word-picture groups did not differ. The implications of these findings for different representational and processing theories of picture memory are discussed.