Staniland Jack, Colombo Michael, Scarf Damian
Department of Psychology, University of Otago.
J Comp Psychol. 2015 Nov;129(4):329-33. doi: 10.1037/a0039450. Epub 2015 Jul 6.
The Generation Effect is the phenomenon wherein attempting to retrieve or generate information from memory leads to better encoding and retention than passive rehearsal. Kornell and Terrace were the first to provide evidence for the Generation Effect in nonhuman animals, demonstrating that two rhesus monkeys performed markedly worse when tested following a passive learning condition relative to an active learning condition. In Experiment 1, using the same paradigm as Kornell and Terrace, we demonstrate that pigeons also display this effect. However, an assumption underlying the Generation Effect is that, under passive learning conditions, subjects will still display some evidence of learning but less than that displayed in active learning conditions. In Experiment 2, we examined this issue by pretraining pigeons on a list with hints and then comparing their acquisition of that same list to animals that did not receive any pretraining. Again, we found no evidence that pretraining on a list with hints conferred any advantage when learning that list without hints, a manipulation that Kornell and Terrace did not undertake. In summary, our data raise doubts about the evidence for the Generation Effect in nonhuman animals.
生成效应是指从记忆中尝试检索或生成信息比被动复述能带来更好的编码和记忆保持的现象。科内尔和 Terrace 是最早在非人类动物中为生成效应提供证据的，他们证明，相对于主动学习条件，两只恒河猴在被动学习条件下接受测试时表现明显更差。在实验 1 中，我们使用与科内尔和 Terrace 相同的范式，证明鸽子也表现出这种效应。然而，生成效应背后的一个假设是，在被动学习条件下，受试者仍会表现出一些学习迹象，但比主动学习条件下表现出的要少。在实验 2 中，我们通过在有提示的列表上对鸽子进行预训练，然后将它们对同一列表的习得情况与未接受任何预训练的动物进行比较，来研究这个问题。同样，我们没有发现证据表明在有提示的列表上进行预训练在无提示学习该列表时会带来任何优势，而科内尔和 Terrace 没有进行这种操作。总之，我们的数据对非人类动物中生成效应的证据提出了质疑。
