Affective Impressions and Memorability of Color-Form Combinations YUIKO SAKUTA JIRO GYOBA Department of Psychology Tohoku University ABSTRACT. In this study the authors investigate how various impressions affect the recognition of color-form pairs. They performed a preliminary study, a main study of impression rating using the semantic differential method, and a recognition experiment. On the basis of the preliminary study, the authors chose 14 appropriate pairs of adjectives and 48 color and form stimuli and used them for the main study. Factor analysis of the main study extracted three factors: Activity, Potency, and Evaluation. In the recognition test, the authors found that color-form pairs with congruent impressions in Activity or Potency were more easily recognized than pairs with incongruent impressions. In contrast, pairs with incongruent impressions in Evaluation were recognized more easily than congruent pairs. These results are discussed in relation to the assumed network representations of affective impressions that have different characteristics depending on the three factors. Key words: color and form, impression, recognition memory, semantic differential method HUMANS RECOGNIZE OR MEMORIZE OBJECTS in their daily lives that consist of combinations of many attributes, such as several parts, colors, or textures. We are interested in trying to determine what types of combinations tend to be more memorable. Many researchers have shown that congruent information with schema or context can be recognized well (Bellezza & Bower, 1981; Cohen, 1977; Cohen, 1981; Judd & Kulik, 1980; Smith & Graesser, 1981), and some researchers have indicated that incongruence in context or expectance encourages memorability (Hamilton & Gifford, 1976; Hastie & Kumar, 1979; Srull, 1981; Whittlesea & Williams, 2001). The Journal of General Psychology, 2006, 133(2), 191-207 Copyright © 2006 Heldref Publications This research was funded by a Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (No. 16650043), sponsoring Jiro Gyoba. This manuscript was edited by Ms. K. Miller, Royal English Language Centre, Fukuoka, Japan. Address correspondence to Yuiko Sakuta, Department of Psychology, Graduate School of Arts & Letters, Tohoku University, Kawauchi27-1, Aoba-ku, Sendai, 980-8576, Japan ; sakuta@sal.tohoku.ac.jp (e-mail).