Anne T Gilman^1,2, Abigail Noyce³; ¹SUNY Albany, ²Bennington College, ³Carnegie Mellon University

The picture superiority effect, a long-documented memory advantage for images over words, yields insights into the impact of aging and degenerative disease on memory, largely due to greater activation from conceptual processing of images (Ally 2012). Do perceptual characteristics play any role in the strength of the picture superiority effect? While this memory advantage has been found for photos (Shepard 1967) and line drawings (Curran & Doyle 2011), those precedents only contrasted image and word stimuli. Rossion & Pourtois (2004) observed faster, more-accurate image naming for color drawings versus monochrome outlines. Heuer (2016) found greater attention paid to photographs than drawings in another image-naming protocol, and a study of verbal associations with images also found an advantage for photographs over color and outline drawings (Gilman 2016). Attempts to clarify whether stimulus characteristics alter picture superiority have shown a consistent trend towards an advantage for drawings over photos (Bran 2025), so long as the photos are nameable. The present study used more trials per block to increase memory load in an attempt to clarify that trend. Since older adults show reduced depth of processing benefits (Craik 2002,2012), to support future aging memory studies, the present study also omitted liking ratings from study trials. Fifty-five undergraduates completed the study and identified their gender (27 women, 23 men, 1 non-binary). Participants gave consent and completed a tutorial before completing two rounds of 75-item study and 150-item test trials. Study blocks included 25 photos, drawings, and words each, with items counterbalanced across participants; all test items were words, following Curran & Doyle (2011). Study format significantly predicted recognition accuracy, F(2,159)=25.7, p<.001. Drawings (63%) and photos (62%) both showed a TukeyHSD-significant difference from words (51%) but not each other (p>.5), suggesting that image type is not a primary driver of the picture superiority effect.