Generating makes words memorable, but so does effective reading

Begg, Ian; Vinski, Ede; Frankovich, Linda; Holgate, Brian

doi:10.3758/bf03199571

Cited by 81 publications

(103 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…As was expected, requiring item-by-item JOLs eliminated the usual perceptual interference effect in free recall, just as occurs with the generation manipulation (Begg et al, 1991;Matvey et al, 2001). Even though the sample consists of 16 participants, the post hoc power analysis suggests that the sample size is reasonable to obtain a significant difference between the two conditions.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 79%

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Easily perceived, easily remembered? Perceptual interference produces a double dissociation between metamemory and memory performance

2013

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A recent candidate for explaining metamemory judgments is the perceptual fluency hypothesis, which proposes that easily perceived items are predicted to be remembered better, regardless of actual memory performance (Rhodes & Castel Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 137:615-625, 2008). In two experiments, we used the perceptual interference manipulation to test this hypothesis. In Experiment 1, participants were presented with intact and backward-masked words during encoding, followed by a metamemory prediction (a list-wide judgment of learning, JOL) and then a free recall test. Participants predicted that intact words would be better recalled, despite better actual memory for words in the perceptual interference condition, yielding a crossed double dissociation between predicted and actual memory performance. In Experiment 2, JOLs were made after each study word. Item-by-item JOLs were likewise higher for intact than for backward-masked words, despite similar actual memory performance for both types of words. The results are consistent with the perceptual fluency hypothesis of metamemory and are discussed in terms of experiencebased and theory-based metamemory judgments.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 79%

“…Research on a related phenomenon, the generation effect, shows this. If a JOL is made after each word, the typical generation effect (greater memory for generated than for read words) is not found (Begg, Vinski, Frankovich, & Holgate, 1991;Matvey et al, 2001). Two reasons are proposed in the literature for this.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Easily perceived, easily remembered? Perceptual interference produces a double dissociation between metamemory and memory performance

2013

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“…Or perhaps the difficult questions induced subjects to engage in more test-appropriate processing of the read items. Begg et al (1991) found that when read items were processed in a meaningful way, the generation effect was eliminated.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Indeed, previous research had demonstrated that the process oftrying to answer the question is the important determinant of memory performance. In fact, a generation advantage was found after an attempt to generate an answer regardless of whether or not the subject produced the answer (Begg, Vinski, Frankovich, & Holgate, 1991;Pressley, McDaniel, Turnure, Wood, & Ahmad, 1987;Slamecka & Fevreiski, 1983). Begg and his colleagues typically required a subject-in the generate conditionto attempt to generate a solution, and if the subject failed, they provided the subject with the intact answer.…”

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confidence: 99%

A generation effect can be found during naturalistic learning

deWinstanley

1995

Psychon Bull Rev

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Recently, Carroll and Nelson (1993) presented research suggesting that general-information questions might represent a boundary condition for the generation effect. The present research focused on whether the generation effect did, in fact, generalize to such questions. In Experiment 1,when subjects read or generated the answers to general-information questions, a generation advantage was demonstrated on a 47-h delayed cued-recall test. However, when the Carroll and Nelson procedure was mimicked by requiring subjects to make an initial attempt to answer the questions, the generation advantage was reduced such that it was no longer statistically significant. In Experiments 2 and 3, the findings ofthe first experiment generalized to a free-recall test. Thus, general-information questions do not represent a boundary condition for the generation effect.The generation effect occurs when an individual better remembers information that he or she produces than information provided by an external source (Jacoby, 1978;Slamecka & Graf, 1978). The generation effect has proven to be remarkably robust across a number of different paradigms and types of materials (see, e.g., Begg & Snider's, 1987, review of the empirical findings). Recently, however, the generality of the effect was challenged. Specifically, Carroll and Nelson (1993) cast doubt on one's ability to extend the laboratory findings to more naturalistic learning situations.Carroll and Nelson (1993) presented subjects with general-information questions (e.g., Which planet was the last to be discovered?). A subject's task was to answer each question out loud. Ifthe subject knew the answer, the question was discarded and another question was shown. If the subject did not know the answer, one of two procedures was followed. In the read condition, the subject was shown the question again with the answer written on a card. The subject had 15sec to study the question and the corresponding answer. In the generate condition, the subject was shown the question and clues to the answer. Either the clues were the number ofletters in the word followed by the first letter, then the second letter, and so on until the subject correctly generated the answer (Experiment 1), or the clue was an anagram ofthe answer (Experiments 2-7). The recall test occurred 1 week after study (Experiments 1-4, 6, and 7) or after a 10-min distractor task (Experiment 5). Furthermore, the generation task was made either easier or This research was supported by a grant from the Keck Foundation. I would like to thank William Friedman, Marie Carroll, Michael Pressley, Norman Slamecka, John Gardiner, Henry Roediger, and anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments on a previous draft. I also thank Amy Hughes for her assistance in running subjects and Gudrun Jonsdottir for scoring subjects' recall. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to P.A. deWinstanley, Department of Psychology, Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH 44074-1086 (e-mail: patty@occs.cs.oberlin. edu). more difficult by the pr...

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“…Begg, Vinski, Frankovich, and Holgate (1991), for example, showed that generation advantages could be eliminated by giving participants effective strategies, such as imagery, to use when encoding to-be-read items. Similarly, deWinstanley and Bjork (1997) eliminated a previously observed generation advantage by giving participants explicit instructions concerning the type of retention test to expect and how to process information optimally in anticipation of such a test.…”

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confidence: 99%