We thank Reed Hunt, Larry Jacoby, Morris Moscovitch, Norm Slamecka, and Endel Tulving for their comments on earlier versions of this paper, Karen Raaflaub-Walsh for testing the amnesic patients, and Carol Macdonald for helping to prepare this manuscript.

Five experiments are reported comparing memory for words that were generated by the subjects themselves with the same words when they were simply presented to be read. In all cases, performance in the generate condition was superior to that in the read condition. This held for measures of cued and uncued recognition, free and cued recall, and confidence ratings. The phenomenon persisted across variations in encoding rules, timed or selfpaced presentation, presence or absence of test information, and between-or within-subjects designs. The effect was specific to the response items under recognition testing but not under cued recall. A number of potential explanatory principles are considered, and their difficulties enumerated. It is concluded that the generation effect is real and that it poses an interesting interpretative problem. This is an empirically oriented article whose purpose is to report a set of simple experiments that establish the existence of a robust and interesting phenomenon of memory. This phenomenon, called the generation effect, is robust in that it manifests itself across a variety of testing procedures, encoding rules, and other situational changes. It is interesting in that it does not seem to be easily or satisfactorily accommodated by any of the currently familiar explanatory notions. We expect that once the phenomenon is described in its initial form, it will be the subject of wider experimental analysis and will eventually become better understood.In contrast to the usual objective reasons for embarking upon a line of research, the present work was neither initiated by any extant theoretical issue nor inspired by any previously published findings. It was carried out with the sole purpose of arriving at a

The performance of three kinds of amnesic patients and control subjects was assessed using four methods for testing memory: free recall, recognition, cued recall, and word completion. Whereas amnesic patients were impaired on free recall, recognition, and cued recall, they were normal on word completion. Moreover, performance on the word-completion test declined at a normal rate reaching chance after about 120 min. The word-completion test resembled the cued-recall test in that the initial letters of previously presented words were given as cues. It differed from cued recall only in the instructions, which directed subjects away from the memory aspects of the test and asked them to complete each three-letter cue with the first word that came to mind. The present results offer an explanation of conflicting findings that have been obtained with amnesic patients on tests of the cued-recall type. The results are considered in terms of a process (activation or procedural learning), which is spared in amnesia and not dependent on the integrity of the damaged brain regions.

No abstract

Amnesia is considered to reflect the effects of damage to a specific brain system required for elaboration, consolidation, and conscious recollection. The study of amnesia is therefore a useful approach for establishing dissociations of function and for understanding the normal organization of memory functions. Amnesic patients and two control groups were tested in two studies of priming. In the first experiment, as measured by a word completion test, all groups exhibited significant priming effects that were greater within a modality than across modalities. The amnesic patients exhibited normal priming effects both within and across modalities, despite severe impairment in recall. In the second experiment, all groups exhibited significant and equivalent priming of category exemplars when category labels were presented and subjects were asked to produce the first exemplars that came to mind. The results extend the domain in which preserved priming effects can be observed in amnesia and they suggest that features of priming observed in normal subjects describe a capacity that is independent of the brain system damaged in amnesia. Studies of amnesia have provided significant insights into the organization of normal memory (for reviews, Cermak, 1982; Rozin, 1976; Squire & Butters, 1984; Squire & Cohen, 1984; Talland, 1965). Recently, studies of new learning capacity in amnesic patients have provided compelling evidence for a distinction between two kinds of memory. These studies showed that amnesic patients are severely impaired in learning new facts and episodes-the events of daily life-yet they are entirely normal in learning perceptualmotor and cognitive skills (

clinicaltrials.gov Identifier: NCT00426881.

Previous research has demonstrated that priming effects on word-completion tests are influenced by newly acquired associations between normatively unrelated words. This phenomenon, which we call implicit memory for new associations, can occur independently of explicit remembering but requires elaborative processing of study materials. The present experiments explored further the relation between elaborative processing and implicit memory for new associations. Results indicated that implicit memory for new associations, like explicit memory, depended on encoding of meaningful relations between paired words in the study list. However, variations in degree and type of associative elaboration had a large effect on explicit memory, as revealed by performance on letter-cued recall and paired-associate tests, but had little effect on implicit memory, as revealed by performance on a word-completion test. Discussion focuses on the theoretical implications of the observed similarities and differences between implicit and explicit memory for new associations.

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