Imagery bizarreness in children's recall of sentences

Bizarre mental images have been advocated as ‘artificial’ memory aids for students since the time of the ancient Greek teachers of rhetoric, yet the few recent experiments in this area, mostly on adults, have generally found bizarreness to be unimportant. In this experiment, 108 12‐year‐olds recalled words from sentences they had rated as producing bizarre images significantly better than they recalled the same words from sentences rated as producing ordinary images. This was true for both expected and unexpected immediate recall, and for unexpected long‐term recall ( P < 0·01 in all cases). A tentative explanation is offered in terms of a cognitive approach to perception itself, suggesting that bizarre images might have properties similar to Berlyne's ‘collative’ stimulus variables, involving subjects at something close to ‘the optimum level of arousal’.