ABSTRACT
The intent of this chapter is to raise several questions about the memorial consequences of imagery instructions. The main point is that imagery instructions affect the manner in wh ich material is mentally organized. That is, the instructions direcdy influence encoding operations, and thereby determine the traces that reside in the memory system. Because any organization of traces is more useful for some retrieval demands than others, imagery instructions will benefit memory performance in some circumstances more than others. It is even the case, as I shall demonstrate shortly, that imagery instructions can hurt memory performance. The message is, therefore, not that imagery he/ps memory, but rather that imagery influences the memory system.
