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Abstract
Previous work has shown that spider phobics have poor recognition memory for spiders. A parallel effect is demonstrated here for memory for spider words. The first experiment found that spider phobic subjects showed less free recall of spider words than control words. The second experiment confirmed this effect, showing additionally that phobin recall fewer spider words than control subjects, that this occurs only in the context of a live (not a dead) spider, that results at delayed testing paralleled those at immediate testing and that comparable results could be obtained for recognition. Poor recall of spider words was found to be accompanied by a high level of spider-related intrusions. It is suggested that phobic subjects do not encode well exactly which spider words are presented for learning, and so may employ a category-based strategy at recall.
