Abstract
The self-choice effect refers to the fact that self-chosen items are remembered better than experimenter-assigned items (Takahashi, 1991). The present study investigated the hypothesis that (a) response choice involves relational processing as activation of both target and context items, and (b) such activated context items are effective as potential retrieval cues for recall of target items. In the experiment, participants chose (choice condition) or were assigned (force condition) a target to remember for each trial. Prior to free recall of the target items, context words, related new words, or unrelated words were presented in a recognition task as potential retrieval cues. The results of a subsequent free recall test indicated that the incidental cues were more effective in the choice condition than in the force condition. Also, recognition resulted in a greater rate of successfully recognized context words at the cost of increasing falsely recognized related new words in the choice condition in comparison with the force condition. These results indicated that response choice activates context items at encoding, which operate as potential retrieval cues for recall of target items. Such cuing mechanisms operative in the self-choice effect are consistent with the multiple-cue theory proposed by Soraci et al. (1994; see also Soraci et al., 1999) for generative processing.
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This article is dedicated to the memory of Sal A. Soraci, who passed way in August 2003. It is a revision of a part of a dissertation completed by the first author under the guidance of Dr. Soraci at Tufts University. A part of this research was presented at the 41st Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, New Orleans.
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Watanabe, T., Soraci, S.A. The self-choice effect from a multiple-cue perspective. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 11, 168–172 (2004). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03206478
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03206478