Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The aim of this study was to identify the effects of perceptual (visual and olfactory) and emotional imageries of food names to word recognition memories. First, we asked Japanese healthy participants to imagine visual (Experiment 1), olfactory (Experiment 2), emotional (Experiment 3), or preferential features (Experiment 4) of presented words associated with foods and drinks (imagining condition), while we also asked them to passively read presented words (reading condition). Second, they judged whether each word was previously presented (word recognition memory task). Results showed that accuracy rates of the imagining condition were significantly higher than those of the reading condition in word recognition memory tasks of all the experiments. Our findings suggest that perceptual and emotional imageries of food names facilitate word recognition memories.