DISSOCIATING THE GENERATION STAGE IN IMPLICIT AND EXPLICIT MEMORY TESTS - INCIDENTAL PRODUCTION CAN DIFFER FROM STRATEGIC ACCESS

An assumption of the generate/recognize model of direct and indirect m emory is that the generation stage is identical on explicit and implic it tests. Two experiments were conducted to examine the generation sta ge by requiring subjects to write down every word-stem solution they c ould generate on either an implicit test, a cued-recall test, or a gen erate/recognize test. In Experiment 1, the subjects studied words and anagrams; target generation was not significantly different on the thr ee tests. However, in Experiment 2, the subjects studied the target wo rds with a context word, and saw either the same or different context with the test stem. Now the generation stages dissociated, such that t he context manipulation had no significant effect on the implicit test , but on the cued-recall test, more targets were generated with the sa me context words than were generated with different context words. The results argue against the claim that dissociations between implicit a nd explicit tests are due only to the addition of recognition processe s on the explicit test, because the generation processes themselves ca n be dissociated.