| Abstract: | Words that are generated as responses to incomplete stimuli are remembered better than complete words that are read. The present research shows that the generation effect occurs only if both reading and generating are done in the same list. Comparisons with unmixed reading controls reveal that the effect occurs because the read words are remembered poorly; the generated ones are no better than the controls. Therefore, the question for theories is not why generating helps memory, but why the demand to generate makes people lazy readers. Furthermore, cued recall of pairs of unrelated words is worse if they were generated than if they were read. We propose that generation is a demand to identify words as independent events. There is nothing special about generating, but the demand to generate is special; it hurts reading. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
