Give me enough time to rehearse: presentation rate modulates the production effect

The Production Effect Becomes Spatial

“…Back in 1990, Nairne assumed that visual items would have two modality-dependent features, while aurally presented items would have 20 (see Nairne, 1990, for a full discussion of this assumption – the basic idea is that verbal material is basically encoded in phonemic and semantic fashion, making visual details less relevant/less likely to be encoded). In line with this, in prior work with verbal materials, we assumed control visual items had two modality-dependent features and orally produced items had 20 (Cyr et al, 2022; Dauphinee et al, 2024; Saint-Aubin et al, 2021). Here, for visuospatial materials, we assumed control and control-square items would have two and five modality-dependent features, respectively, while produced items would have 10.…”

“…As mentioned in the introduction, according to the RFM, producing the items should add relevant modality-dependent features. With these additional features, the items would be more distinctive and therefore more likely to be properly recalled (Cyr et al, 2022; Dauphinee et al, 2024; Saint-Aubin et al, 2021). However, the addition of said features comes at a cost: It blocks rehearsal.…”

“…When comparing the verbal and spatial production effects, one may wonder about the absence of a crossover interaction between production and serial positions. In free recall, order reconstruction, and immediate serial recall of verbal materials, compared to control items, produced items are better recalled at the end of the list and less well recalled at the beginning of the list (see Dauphinee et al, 2024; Fawcett et al, 2023; Gionet et al, 2022, for reviews). As discussed above, in the RFM, one difference between visually and aurally presented verbal materials is the smaller number of modality-dependent features associated with visual items.…”

“…Recently, the RFM has met with considerable success in modeling a complex series of findings related to the production effect (Cyr et al, 2022; Dauphinee et al, 2024; Saint-Aubin et al, 2021). In the production effect, memory for verbal material improves when encoding involves some form of active encoding relative to items processed more passively by simply reading them silently (see MacLeod & Bodner, 2017, for an overview).…”

“…Souza et al (2020) showed that gaze-based rehearsal behaviors were more frequent and efficient in the presence of a grid compared to a control condition without a grid, leading to better memory performance. Therefore, if producing items interferes with rehearsal, deleterious effects should be more easily observed, relative to a condition where rehearsal is less likely (Cyr et al, 2022; Dauphinee et al, 2024; Saint-Aubin et al, 2021). Simultaneously, producing the items should add modality-dependent features which would be beneficial to retrieval.…”