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.
Method