The production effect is a memory advantage for items studied aloud over items studied silently. Although it typically is found within subjects, here we also obtained it between subjects in a recognition task-providing new evidence that production can be an effective study strategy. Our experiment, and a set of meta-analyses, also evaluated whether the within effect reflects costs to silent items and/or benefits to aloud items. Contrary to a strong distinctiveness account, we found little evidence that aloud items show an additional within-subjects benefit. Instead, silent items suffered an additional within-subjects cost. Blocking silent and aloud items eliminated this cost, suggesting that the cost was due to mixing silent and aloud items. Our discussion focuses on implications for distinctiveness and strength accounts of the production effect and on how to implement production as an encoding strategy depending on the learner's goals.

The production effect refers to a memory advantage for items studied aloud over items studied silently. Ozubko and MacLeod (2010) used a list-discrimination task to support a distinctiveness account of the production effect over a strength account. We report new findings in this task--including negative production effects--that better fit with an attributional account of this task. According to the attributional account, list judgments are influenced by recognition memory, knowledge of the composition of the 2 lists, and a bias to attribute non-recognized items to the 1st list. Using a recognition task to eliminate these attributional influences revealed production effects consistent with either a distinctiveness or strength account. In our discussion, we consider whether the absence of production effects on implicit-memory tests and in between-group designs provides unequivocal support for a distinctiveness account over a strength account.

The production effect reflects a memory advantage for words read aloud versus silently. We investigated how production influences free recall of a single long list of words. In each of 4 experiments, a production effect occurred in a mixed-list group but not across pure-list groups. When compared to the pure-list groups, the mixed-list effects typically reflected a cost to silent words rather than a benefit to aloud words. This cost persisted when participants had to perform a generation or imagery task for the silent items, ruling out a lazy reading explanation. This recall pattern challenges both distinctiveness and strength accounts, but is consistent with an item-order account. By this account, the aloud words in a mixed list disrupt the encoding of item-order information for the silent words, thus impairing silent word recall. However, item-order measures and a forced-choice order test did not provide much evidence that recall was guided by retrieval of item-order information. We discuss our pattern of results in light of another recent study of the effects of production on long-list recall. (PsycINFO Database Record

Reading a list of words aloud can improve recognition over silently reading them. This between-groups production effect (PE) cannot be due to relative distinctiveness because each group studies only 1 type of item. We tested 2 other possibilities. By a strategy account, a pure-aloud group might benefit from use of a production-based distinctiveness strategy at test (e.g., "Did I say this word aloud?"). By a strength account, aloud items may simply be more strongly encoded than silent items. To evaluate these accounts, we tested whether a between-group PE occurs when participants experience a salient within-group manipulation of font size, generation, or imagery at study. The answer was yes, except when imagery was the within-group task. This pattern, and aspects of participants' strategy reports, fit well with a strategy account if it is assumed that the imagery task led participants to abandon a production-based strategy. However, many of our findings were also compatible with an evaluated strength account if it is assumed that the imagery task led participants to abandon evaluating memory strength. In conjunction with recent findings, we suggest that multiple processes may contribute to the PE, and the relevant subset in play will differ as a function of study design, study task, and memory test. (PsycINFO Database Record

We used a visual oddball paradigm to investigate whether a shared verbal label makes two objects belonging to different conceptual categories less perceptually distinct. In Experiment 1, the critical images shared a label as well as some perceptual features referring to the color and the fruit), and in Experiment 2, the critical images shared a label but no perceptual features referring to the animal and the sports equipment). In both experiments comparison images were similar to each of the critical images but they did not share a label. A reduced deviant-related negativity (DRN) was observed for critical images compared with comparison images in both experiments, suggesting that the critical image pairs were perceived as less distinct than comparison pairs. These results extend previous research using the visual oddball paradigm that has shown that images from the same conceptual category are perceived as more distinct when they have different labels, and provide further support for the label-feedback hypothesis (Lupyan, 2012) in which language is assumed to modulate perception online. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).