Perceptual organization as a determinant of visual recognition memory.

Results of experiments by Shepard (1967) and by Standing, Conezio, and Haber (1970) suggest that recognition memory for pictures is virtually unlimited. Neisser (1967) implied that such performance depends on a specifically "visual memory," and Haber (1970) has also suggested that there may be "one kind of memory for pictorial material and another for linguistic" (p. 104). However, it is clear that not all pictorial materials are remembered equally well, for studies using meaningless forms and patterns (Goldstein and Chance, 1971) have produced far lower levels of performance. Thus, it is not the visual modality itself that leads to easy recognition. Goldstein and Chance have suggested that both the heterogeneity and the familiarity of visual stimuli play critical roles, but the precise manner in which these variables are supposed to affect recognition-memory performance has not been made clear. It seems to us that recognition can reach high levels of accuracy only when the material has been perceived and organized by the subject in an articulate and meaningful way that it is not heterogeneity and familiarity themselves but the meaningful structure of what is seen that makes it easily remembered. One aspect of meaningfulness is a knowledge of the properties of objects, or classes of objects, by which they can consistently be distinguished from other objects or classes. For example, a knowledge of the distinctive features of faces provides convenient and economical ways in which a face can be specified, and thereby provides dimensions for the storage of information relevant to recognition tasks. This implies that familiarity with classes of objects is related to recog-