A GENERATION EFFECT CAN BE FOUND DURING NATURALISTIC LEARNING

Recently Carroll and Nelson (1993) presented research suggesting that general-information questions might represent a boundary condition for the generation effect. The present research focused on whether the ge neration effect did, in fact, generalize to such questions. In Experim ent 1, when subjects read or generated the answers to general-informat ion questions, a generation advantage was demonstrated on a 47-h delay ed cued-recall test. However, when the Carroll and Nelson procedure wa s mimicked by requiring subjects to make an initial attempt to answer the questions, the generation advantage was reduced such that it was n o longer statistically significant. In Experiments 2 and 3, the findin gs of the first experiment generalized to a free-recall test. Thus, ge neral-information questions do not represent a boundary condition for the generation effect.