Widner R L
School of Psychology, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta 30332-0170, USA.
Memory. 1995 Mar;3(1):1-19. doi: 10.1080/09658219508251494.
Memory retention is greater for information that is subject-produced rather than experimenter-provided; this enhancement has been labelled the generation effect. One explanation of this phenomenon, the Lexical Activation Hypothesis, assumes that lexical representation is a necessary condition for emergence of the effect. A corollary to this hypothesis, the Lexical Spread Hypothesis (Nairne, Pusen, & Widner, 1985), emphasises associative spread as a mediating variable. This single-factor explanation has relied for its support exclusively on recognition performance. In the present study, four experiments examined the viability of this hypothesis, under recognition and free-recall conditions. A two-factor explanation is proposed to account for the findings of the present study. It appears that associative spread does not mediate the generation effect, when a recognition test is administered, but may mediate free-recall performance, where retrieval networks play a more significant role in memory performance. An alternative explanation, based on the benefits to memory retention obtained from disruptions of familiar orthographic patterns, is proposed to account for the recognition findings.
对于由主体产生而非实验者提供的信息，记忆保持效果更佳；这种增强效应被称为生成效应。对这一现象的一种解释，即词汇激活假说，假定词汇表征是该效应出现的必要条件。这一假说的一个推论，即词汇扩散假说（奈尔恩、普森和维德纳，1985年），强调联想扩散是一个中介变量。这一单因素解释的依据完全是识别表现。在本研究中，四项实验在识别和自由回忆条件下检验了这一假说的可行性。本研究提出了一种双因素解释来解释研究结果。当进行识别测试时，联想扩散似乎并未介导生成效应，但在自由回忆表现中可能起中介作用，在自由回忆中检索网络在记忆表现中发挥着更重要的作用。为了解释识别结果，还提出了另一种基于扰乱熟悉的正字法模式对记忆保持有益的解释。
