Five classes of relations between an object and its setting can characterize the organization of objects into real-world scenes. The relations are (1) Interposition (objects interrupt their background), (2) Support (objects tend to rest on surfaces), (3) Probability (objects tend to be found in some scenes but not others), (4) Position (given an object is probable in a scene, it often is found in some positions and not others), and (5) familiar Size (objects have a limited set of size relations with other objects). In two experiments subjects viewed brief (150 msec) presentations of slides of scenes in which an object in a cued location in the scene was either in a normal relation to its background or violated from one to three of the relations. Such objects appear to (1) have the background pass through them, (2) float in air, (3) be unlikely in that particular scene, (4) be in an inappropriate position, and (5) be too large or too small relative to the other objects in the scene. In Experiment I, subjects attempted to determine whether the cued object corresponded to a target object which had been specified in advance by name. With the exception of the Interposition violation, violation costs were incurred in that the detection of objects undergoing violations was less accurate and slower than when those same objects were in normal relations to their setting. However, the detection of objects in normal relations to their setting (innocent bystanders) was unaffected by the presence of another object undergoing a violation in that same setting. This indicates that the violation costs were incurred not because of an unsuccessful elicitation of a frame or schema for the scene but because properly formed frames interfered with (or did not facilitate) the perceptibility of objects undergoing violations. As the number of violations increased, target detectability generally decreased. Thus, the relations were accessed from the results of a single fixation and were available sufficiently early during the time course of scene perception to affect the perception of the objects in the scene. Contrary to expectations from a bottom-up account of scene perception, violations of the pervasive physical relations of Support and Interposition were not more disruptive

It is hypothesized that age deficits in recall are due to a reduction in available processing resource. It is argued that the formation of a distinct encoding in which unique aspects of the context are integrated with the target item requires a substantial amount of attentional resource, but that the core semantic features of words are encoded relatively automatically. Thus, under conditions of reduced processing resource, a general, stereotyped encoding will result. The effectiveness of general, categorical retrieval cues was compared to the effectiveness of contextually specific retrieval cues in three experiments. Young adults recalled more than old adults when they were cued with specific retrieval cues, but no age differences were observed when general retrieval cues were used. A similar pattern of results was obtained when the amount of processing resource was experimentally reduced by requiring young adults to perform a concurrent task during encoding.Many recent views of human memory have been couched in terms of encoding processes, retrieval processes, and their interrelations. Within such a

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The hypothesis that age deficits in long-term episodic memory tasks are due to imparied metamemorial skills was investigated in a paired-associate task that required participants to predict the likelihood of recalling individual items. Both young and old adults were able to predict their ability to recall, and both age groups were equally sensitive to the effects of differences in the degree of relatedness between word-pair members on subsequent recall. However, both old and young adults were insensitive to the beneficial effects of using interactive imagery at encoding. It was concluded that differences in metamemorial skills are not responsible for age differences in memory.

The generation effect was studied in the absence of specific encoding cues. Subjects generated single words from word fragments (AL OHO ) and then attempted to recognize them in a subsequent test. In Experiment 1, subjects either read or generated at both encoding and retrieval. A recognition advantage was found for generating at encoding, which demonstrates that the generation effect holds for single items and is not necessarily a function of an enriched relation between the generated word and its context. However, generating items at test improved performance only if the items were also generated at encoding. This generation specificity effect demonstrates that existing theories of the generation effect are incomplete and suggests a role for the repetition of generation operations in producing a memorial advantage. The precise nature of the specificity effect was examined in four subsequent experiments. It was found that the more closely the operations at retrieval matched those at encoding, the better the recognition performance. We concluded that a complete description of the generation effect must include both a general encoding factor to account for the main effect of generation at encoding and a specific processing component to account for the extra advantage obtained when similar generation operations are reinstated at test.Verbal material that is self-generated is 1980; Kane & Anderson, 1978), and for subsequently remembered better than mate-single words from anomalous sentences (Graf, rial that is simply read. The generation effect, 1980). It has been demonstrated in free and as it has been called (Slamecka & Graf, cued recall and recognition and in both in-1978), has been found for related word pairs cidental and intentional learning situations. (Donaldson & Bass, 1980;Jacoby, 1978; SLa-Despite the pervasiveness of the phenommecka & Graf, 1978), meaningful sentences enon, theoretical explanations have not been (Anderson, Goldberg, & Hidde, 1971; Graf, entirely successful in accounting for all of the data. McElroy and Slamecka (1982) divided the explanations into two broad categories: This research was supported by the Natural Sciences those implicating semantic memory and those and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Grant placing the loCUS of the effect in the generation i 8 ^1 tO r F !"f M -^r "* b Ll S Tu ReSt r h f P roc ess itself. Their failure to find a memorialProgram Grant from the Connaught Fund, University of j c Toronto. We wish to thank Fergus Craik for his useful advantage for generated nonwords led them comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript. We also to Conclude that (a) semantic memory must thank Rebecca Broder, Kathryn Dance, and Steven Sibley be involved in the generation effect and (b) for experimental assistance, and Carol Macdonald for the act of generating can not in itself be preparation of the manuscript.