title: Generation and mnemonic encoding induce a mirror effect in the DRM paradigm.
abstract: Encoding tasks that increase memory accuracy are appealing from both practical and theoretical perspectives. Within the Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm, we found that generating list words from anagrams (relative to reading) produced a mirror effect: enhanced recognition of studied words coupled with a reduction in false recognition. Signal detection analyses suggest that the increase in correct recognition was due to enhanced item-specific encoding of the list words, whereas the reduction in false recognition was due to enhanced strategic monitoring at test (i.e., a distinctiveness heuristic), rather than to reduced relational encoding at study. Further support for a distinctiveness heuristic account was obtained using both "theme judgment" instructions and within-group conditions. In our final experiment, we replicated this mirror effect using a purely mnemonic (self-referential) encoding task, showing that extra perceptual cues are not necessary to induce participants to adopt a successful memory-improvement strategy at test.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
authors.forename: Raymond W
authors.initials: RW
authors.lastname: Guntre
authors.forename: Glen E
authors.initials: GE
authors.lastname: Bodner
authors.forename: Tanjeem
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Azad
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D008568:Memory; D017603:Signal Detection, Psychological; D014825:Vocabulary