A generation effect can be found during naturalistic learning

Abstract

Recently, Carroll and Nelson (1993) presented research suggesting that general-information questions might represent a boundary condition for the generation effect. The present research focused on whether the generation effect did, in fact, generalize to such questions. In Experiment 1, when subjects read or generated the answers to general-information questions, a generation advantage was demonstrated on a 47-h delayed cued-recall test. However, when the Carroll and Nelson procedure was mimicked by requiring subjects to make an initial attempt to answer the questions, the generation advantage was reduced such that it was no longer statistically significant. In Experiments 2 and 3, the findings of the first experiment generalized to a free-recall test. Thus, general-information questions do not represent a boundary condition for the generation effect.