Otemon Gakuin University
Summary  The present study investigated the effects of social elaboration on intentional free recall. In the learning phase, participants were asked to remember targets words to associate each target word with a particular person in a social elaboration condition. In addition, they were asked to remember target words and associate each target word with a particular word that was related to the target in a semantic elaboration condition. The learning phase was followed by a free recall test and a checking phase. In the checking phase, participants were asked to indicate whether each target reminded them of a particular person or word. Targets associated with a particular person were recalled more often than those associated with a particular word. The result showed the superiority of social elaboration over semantic elaboration and were interpreted as showing that information about a particular person made the target more distinctive than did information about a particular word.
Recall of target words is determined by the encoding contexts. When additional information is added to the contexts, this additional information can become a cue for retrieving each target. According to previous studies (Jacoby & Craik, 1979; Toyota, 1987), the addition of information to the target is defined as elaboration. The quality of information added to the targets determines the effectiveness of elaboration. Effective elaboration (precise elaboration) leads to better performance than non-effective elaboration (imprecise elaboration). Stein, Morris, and Bransford (1978) compared the effects of three types of sentence frames as contexts for the target word (e.g., “fat”) on incidental memory: a base sentence (e.g., “The fat man read the sign.”); a precise elaboration sentence (e.g., “The fat man read the sign warning about thin ice.”); and an imprecise elaboration sentence (e.g., “The fat man read the sign that was two feet high.”). Participants were asked to rate the degree of comprehension of each sentence in an orienting phase, which was followed by incidental recall test. The precise elaboration sentence frame led to better recall of the targets than the base sentence frame, which in turn led to better recall than the imprecise sentence frame. The superiority of precise elaboration sentences over other sentences may be the result of the precise elaboration sentence making the meaning of each target clearer. In other words, the meaning of each target was constrained by the context of the precise elaboration. Toyota (1984) and Toyota (2000) have also investigated the effects of types of sentence frame. In those studies, two types of sentences were provided: interchangeable and non-interchangeable. In an interchangeable sentence (e.g., “His hair is long.”), a target word (e.g., “long”) can be interchanged with an associated word (e.g., “short”), whereas in a non-interchangeable sentence (e.g., “The graffe’s neck is long.”), a target cannot be interchanged with an associated word. If a target was substituted with an associate word in a non-interchangeable sentence, the sentence would not make sense. Thus, in this situation, the meaning of each target was constrained by the context provided by the non-interchangeable sentence. The studies described above illustrate the semantic constraints of context on recall. The more the meaning of target was constrained, the more distinctive the target became and the more frequently it was recalled. A number of studies (Merry, 1980; Cox & Wollen, 1981; Cornoldi, McDaniel & Einstein, 1986; Imai & Richman, 1991; Toyota, 1987, 2002; Robinson-Rieger, & McDaniel, 1994) have described the effects of “bizarreness” on memory. For example, a bizarre sentence (e.g., “My sister have a beard.”) can lead to better recall than “normal” sentence (e.g., “My sister puts on a skirt.”). One explanation of the “bizarreness effect” is that bizarre sentences make the targets more distinctive.
In addition, Furthermore, the superiority of autobiographical elaboration (Warren, Chattin, Thompson, & Tomsky, 1983) over the semantic elaboration on memory is caused by a difference in distinctiveness between the two types of elaboration. Autobiographical elaboration refers to the addition of past episodes to the target (Warren et al. , 1983, Toyota, 1989). Such episodes are retrieved from episodic memory (Tulving, 1972), and are idiosyncratic. Thus, these episodes are more distinctive than the semantic elaboration that occurs when semantic information is added to the context (Toyota, 1997). As mentioned above, distinctiveness is critical to accurate recall performance. In particular, Hunt (2006) has stressed the role of distinctiveness on memory. The more distinctive a target, the more it would be recalled. Specifically, contexts that make a target more distinctive will be more effective in influencing retrieval of the target.
Toyota and Kita (2010) proposed a type of elaboration, named social elaboration, in which the target is made distinctive by adding celebrities’ names. Each target word and the name of a celebrity who was congruous or incongruous to the target, were presented in a social elaboration condition. By contrast, in a semantic elaboration condition, each target and a word (either a semantic associate or non-associate), were presented. Participants were asked to rate the degree of congruity between each target and its paired word (i.e., the celebrity’s name or the semantic word), and were then given an incidental free recall test. The results showed that social elaboration led to better recall than semantic elaboration. This result was interpreted as showing that a particular person’s information was rich, distinctive, and effective for aiding recall of the target it elaborated. However, because Toyota and Kita (2010) presented celebrities’ names as the social information in a social elaboration condition, it is not clear whether the social information plus the celebrity’s name or only the celebrity’s name was responsible for the improved target retrieval. According to Keenan and Baillet (1980), the information about the person that is familiar to each participants is rich, well-constructed, and easy to access. Thus, the familiar person’s information as well as celebrity’s name would be effective in retrieving the target. In Toyota and Kita (2010), the celebrity’s name was presented by the experimenter, and the target was elaborated by the experimenter. Previous studies (Pressley, McDaniel, Turnure, Wood, & Ahmad, 1987; Toyota, 1998) showed the self-generated elaboration effect on memory, targets elaborated by information generated by participants were recalled more often than targets provided by experimenter. In other words, self-generated elaboration was more effective than experimenter-provided elaboration. Considering this self-generated effects, the present study used a procedure that asked the participants to generate the social information (i.e., a familiar person, celebrity name, or anyone else) in a social elaboration condition, and the semantic information (associate word) in a semantic elaboration condition.
Although Toyota and Kita (2010) used the incidental memory procedure, person information may also be an effective cue for retrieving a target in an intentional memory procedure. Participants in an intentional procedure have stronger intentions to recall targets and to use the connection between a target and its associated person’s information, compared to those in an incidental procedure.
Thus the present study compared the effect of social elaboration by generating person information with that of semantic elaboration by generating an associate word on intentional free recall. It was assumed that person information would be a distinctive cue for retrieving each target. Given this assumption, it was predicted that targets associated with a particular person would be recalled more often than those associated with a word. The purpose of the present study was to test this prediction.
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