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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