Discussion
The purpose of the present study was to compare the effects of social
elaboration and semantic elaboration on intentional free recall. The
prediction was that social elaboration would lead to better recall than
the semantic elaboration. The results were consistent with this
prediction. The superiority of social elaboration over semantic
elaboration previously found in the incidental free recall (Toyota &
Kita, 2010) was also found in intentional free recall in the present
study. Toyota and Kita (2010) used the celebrities’ names as the
information added to a target in the social elaboration condition,
whereas in the present study, generated person information was used as
the added information. These results indicate that both generated person
information and celebrities’ names can effectively make each target more
distinctive, and that effect was occurs in both incidental and
intentional memory. Hunt (2006) stressed the importance of
distinctiveness on memory. Several factors that increase the level of
distinctiveness have been studied: the sematic constraints of contexts
(Stein et al. , 1978; Toyota, 1984, 2001), autobiographical
episodes (Warren et al. , 1983; Toyota, 1989), and bizarre
sentence (Merry, 1980; Toyota, 2002). The present results indicate that
the generated person information was is another determinants of level of
distinctiveness. Notably, the present study used the intentional recall
procedure. In this situation, the participants were motivated to recall
as many of the targets as possible. Thus, they were more aware of the
cue for retrieving the targets. Person information is a critical
retrieval cue for each target, because it has a unique connection to the
corresponding target. In other words, the strong connection between a
target and the person information (i.e., mother, friends, name of film
actor, etc.) passes retrieval to the target.
Although it was not the purpose of the present study, a large difference
of recall performance was found between targets that had added generated
information and those that did not. Pressley et al. (1987) used
the incidental memory procedure, presented each participants with a
sentence including a target word (e.g., “The hungry man got into the
car.”) and asked them to answer an elaborative interrogation (e.g.,
“Why did the particular man do that?”) prior to the incidental recall
test. Recall performance of target word (e.g., “hungry”) was lower
when the participants could not answer the elaborative interrogation.
The reason is that the absence of an answer meant there was no cue
present to integrate the target into the cognitive structure
(Hashtroudi, Parker, DeLisi, & Wyatt, 1983). With respect to the
intentional memory procedure used in the present study, if there was an
absence of generated information (i.e., person or word), then there was
no retrieval cue for the target. Thus, the lower performance was caused
by the absence of a target retrieval cue.
Finally, one methodological problem should be mentioned. The procedure
resulted in a variety of generated information. For example, in the
social elaboration condition, the generated person information included
a variety of people, such as a celebrity’s name or the participant’s
mother, father, sister, friend, teacher, etc. Unfortunately, the present
study did not clarify the details of the generated person information.
If this information were to be clarified, we would be able to determine
which aspects of person information increase the level of
distinctiveness. Thus, further research in which participants are asked
to report the details of the person information generated during the
learning phase is necessary.
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