Failure to obtain a generation effect during naturalistic learning

Abstract

Many experiments have obtained a generation effect (GE) with various kinds of laboratory items. Six of the present seven experiments failed to find a GE when the responses were answers to general information questions that had been learned by college undergraduates who had either read or generated the answers during learning several days before the retention test. A GE also did not occur when those same answers were used as responses in paired-associate learning and were tested 20 min after learning. The GE appeared only when subjects learned lists of answers in the absence of the question context, followed by recognition testing. Implications of these findings are drawn both for the generality of the GE, especially to the kind of items and naturalistic situations in which learning occurs outside the laboratory, and for the theoretical mechanisms that may underlie the GE in traditional laboratory situations.