The generation effect and the modeling of associations in memory

• Published in: Memory & cognition Vol. 23; no. 4; pp. 442 - 455
• Main Author: Clark, Steven E.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Psychonomic Society 01.07.1995; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Adult; Aided Recall; Associative Processes; Attention; Cognition & reasoning; Cues; Encoding; Female; Humans; Male; Memory; Mental Recall; Models, Statistical; Paired-Associate Learning; Psychophysics; Recognition; Unaided Recall
• ISSN: 0090-502X; 1532-5946
• DOI: 10.3758/BF03197245

The search of associative memory (SAM) model of Gillund and Shiffrin (1984) was applied to data of two experiments that examined the generation effect (Slamecka & Graf, 1978). Subjects studied a list of related word pairs, in which they either read both words in the pair or generated the right- hand response term using the left-hand stimulus term plus the response word fragment as generation cues. Experiment 1 manipulated encoding condition within subjects and used an incidental learning procedure. Experiment 2 manipulated encoding condition between subjects and used an intentional learning procedure. Memory was tested with recognition, cued recall, and free recall. A higher order association model gave a better and more parsimonious fit to the results than did an item-level association model. The relationship between various versions of SAM and current accounts of the generation effect are discussed, particulary the two-factor theory of Hirshman and Bjork (1988).