Personal reminders: Self-generated reminders boost memory more than normatively related ones

Zhang, Di; Tullis, Jonathan G.

doi:10.3758/s13421-020-01120-7

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 59 publications

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“…For half of the concepts, they generated their own mnemonic cue to help remember the idea; for the other half, they received a cue that a prior participant generated. The method of passing cues to the next participant has been used widely when testing the effectiveness of simple cues (e.g., Zhang & Tullis, 2021) because it controls for the content of the cues and the mnemonics are identical across conditions. This novel comparison between self-generated and peer-generated conditions tests whether self-generated cues have special properties (i.e., distinctiveness and connections to idiosyncratic knowledge) and processes (i.e., generation) that uniquely support memory, as suggested by prior theory (Tullis & Finley, 2018).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Generating mnemonics boosts recall of chemistry information.

Tullis¹,

Qiu²

2022

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied

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Students frequently generate mnemonic cues to help them remember difficult or abstract information (Tullis & Maddox, Metacognition and Learning, 2020, 15, 129). Self-generated mnemonics have the potential to be particularly effective means of remembering target information because they can transform abstract information into meaningful units, connect information to existing schema, and create distinct retrieval routes to the targets. Across five experiments, we compared the effectiveness of self-generated mnemonics to mnemonics generated by others for remembering chemistry information. Generating one's own mnemonics consistently boosted recall for both the chemistry content and the mnemonic itself. However, experimentally boosting recall of mnemonics through retrieval practice did not affect recall of associated chemistry content. These results indicate that improved recall of chemistry content is not caused by better recall of the mnemonic itself; rather, generating a mnemonic involves deep and effortful processing of chemistry content that boosts recall more than reading someone else's mnemonic. Public Significance StatementCreating their own mnemonics can help students remember chemistry content and the mnemonic better than reading mnemonics generated by others. Generating mnemonics is an effective strategy to remember information because it prompts students to deeply process the material.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%