
 




 The present experiment uses a common procedure to test the effect of
 concreteness on recognition memory. The effect should be fairly
 pronounced in a sense that highly concrete words are remembered better
 than the words low on concreteness. The explanation for this finding
 can be found in the spontaneous use of imagery as a mnemonic method
 (Bower, 1973). The design can be improved by making it a between
 subjects design where one group of subjects would be explicitly
 instructed to try to imagine words. This manipulation should
 result in better recognition of condition 1 stimuli, while
 condition 2 scores should not be significantly affected. You can
 easily perform such experiment by changing instructions and running
 the experiment with two groups of randomly selected subjects.

 The scores should be analysed in terms of signal detection theory.








 There are two conditions: High concreteness (condition 1) and low
 concreteness (condition 2). Gilhooly and Logie (1980) concreteness word
 measures were used to select high and low concrete words.



 Procedure
 =========

 First, subjects are presented with a primary set of words (target words).
 Second, they are tested on recognition memory for all target words. 














 Originally this experiment was set up with only two conditions, high
 (condition 1) and low concreteness words (condition 2). However, you can
 easily change the nature and the number of conditions (any number between
 2 and 9 is acceptable). For example, instead of high and low concreteness
 your conditions could be high, medium and low familiarity, or names
 of birds and names of mammals. Read the Readme.txt file for details on how
 to  change the number of conditions in this experiment.
