THE TIME-COURSE OF THE GENERATION EFFECT

The generation effect, in which items generated by following some rule are remembered better than stimuli that are simply read, has been stu died intensely over the past two decades. To date, however, researcher s have largely ignored the temporal aspects of this effect. In the pre sent research, we used a variable onset time for the presentation of t he to-be-remembered material, thus providing the ability to determine at what point during processing the generation effect originates. The results indicate that some benefit from generation attempts occurs eve n when subjects have only a few hundred milliseconds in which to proce ss the stimulus, but that more of the benefit occurs later. This findi ng suggests that the generation effect results from continuous or mult iple discrete stages of information accrual or strengthening of memory traces over time, rather than from a single discrete increment upon f inal generation.