The effects of generation on conceptual implicit memory

Abstract

The generation effect has been central to theoretical analyses of implicit memory and has been used as a criterion for classifying implicit tests as conceptual. The present experiments demonstrate that generation does not always enhance conceptual implicit memory. Four experiments examined the effects of generation on conceptual implicit and explicit memory in category-exemplar production and category-cued recall, respectively. Two nonsemantic generation tasks, letter transposition and word-fragment generation, affected recall but not conceptual priming, dissociating performance on the two conceptual tests. A semantic generation task, however, enhanced both recall and priming. Finally, the letter-transposition task enhanced conceptual priming when categorical information was salient at encoding (in study lists blocked by category) but not when categorical information was nonobvious (in randomly ordered study lists). These results help delineate conditions under which generation effects are obtained in conceptual priming and are discussed in terms of the item-specific–relational distinction ( Hunt & McDaniel, 1993).