Generation Effect - Limitations

Limitations

By manipulating materials or instructions, experimenters have reduced or eliminated the generation effect. This suggests that there are instances in which reading can have the same memorial gains as generating. For example, when participants are given instructions to process information in a manner that was similar to the processing performed by the participants in the generate condition, the generation advantage between the groups was eliminated. In another study, participants who used a processing strategy (imagery) that was more effective than reading performed just as well as those who generated.

Although the generation effect is a robust finding, there are some studies that have found no memorial benefits of generating compared to reading. For example, one study did not find the generation effect when they used legal nonwords and found a reduced generation effect when they used material unfamiliar to the participants. They concluded that generating may have limited effectiveness when applied to new or unfamiliar material. This warrants some concern because if the generation effect is to be incorporated into educational practices such as classroom teaching, we would want it to help students learn new material.

It is possible that the generation effect may cause a trade-off in encoding item information and associative information. The processing of item-specific features of the target item may be enhanced when generating, and generating may also enhance the processing of cue-target relation. But, encoding requires limited-capacity resources, so the better encoding of one type of information may occur at a cost to the encoding of other information. This also has implications for applying generation to educational practices because even if generation improves the recall of specific words, the memory for the contextual information surrounding those words may suffer.