Abstract
Thegeneration effect, in which items generated by following some rule are remembered better than stimuli that are simply read, has been studied intensely over the past two decades. To date, however, researchers have largely ignored the temporal aspects of this effect. In the present research, we used a variable onset time for the presentation of the to-be-remembered material, thus providing the ability to determine at what point during processing the generation effect originates. The results indicate that some benefit from generation attempts occurs even when subjects have only a few hundred milliseconds in which to process the stimulus, but that more of the benefit occurs later. This finding suggests that the generation effect results from continuous or multiple discrete stages of information accrual or strengthening of memory traces over time, rather than from a single discrete increment upon final generation.
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This research was supported in part by Army Research Institute Contract MDA903-93-K-0010 to the University of Colorado (A.H., Principal Investigator).
—Accepted by previous editor, Geoffrey R. Loftus
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Smith, R.W., Healy, A.F. The time-course of the generation effect. Memory & Cognition 26, 135–142 (1998). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03211376
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03211376