Collage your memory...

After adding in a fourth image I found that people were still not really getting the same stories and my results were too diverse. One example of this stage of the experiment is:

Female, age 20, Art student

Someone was murdered in the big castle by stabbing them with paperclips and the only thing that witnessed it was the duck.

As you can see this is very far from my chosen target story so I decided to add in text to see if this made any difference. I added in the words "Tourist", "Mote" and "Choked".

This had an immediate impact. Here are some of the results:

Female, age 20, Textiles student

There was a castle with a huge mote surrounding it. The ducks which swam in the mote were poisoned after they ate paperclips which had been thrown into the river by tourists causing the ducks to die.

Female, age 20, Textiles student

There were ducks swimming in the mote surrounding a big castle. The tourists visiting the castle threw paperclips into the mote which the ducks then choked on.

Female, age 19, Graphics student

The duck was swimming in a mote surrounding the castle in the tourist area when it got tangled in paperclips and choked to death covering the mote in blood.

Female, age 19, Graphics student

A duck at a tourist centre in scotland was choked in the mote around the castle by paperclips dumped in the mote.

Having completed this experiment testing the theory of polysemous I would definitely agree that imagery can have multiple meanings and that your perceptions and cultural backgrounds may effect your response to certain types of imagery. From this task I can clearly agree with Barthes about the importance and added value of introducing text into the equation as this swayed my subjects to all think roughly in and around the same area. I would comfortably say that through carrying out this activity it has cleared up some confusion and I now feel that my understanding of this theory is slightly better.