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"The Production Effect in Memory" by Colin M. MacLeod and Glen E.
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Bodner is an arti- cle that describes the work that these two performed in order to test their theories surround- ing the production effect. The production effect is the difference in memory favoring words read aloud relative to words read silently during study. Colin M. MacLeod and Glen E. Bod- ner wanted to test which had more of an impact on one's memory. They reviewed research on the production effect and outlined important boundary conditions and important extensions.
They also evaluated the evidence that came after their research.
Their purpose was to review what they learned about the production effect from their research and to invite others to pur- sue the unanswered questions. This paper will provide information based on their studies and background on the overall concept of the production effect. It will also analyze their re- search, evidence, and experimental process. Colin M. MacLeod and Glen E. Bodner explain that in a typical production effect pro- duction effect experiment, “people study a list of words shown one at a time with print color dictating whether a word is to be produced or read silently, and a memory test follows.” (390)
They found that "people were more likely to reuse a reference that they had personally spo- ken earlier, relative to a reference spoken by someone else." (391) They found conflicting evidence based on distinctiveness and strength. The production tasks were simple to perform, but their effects on memory have been proven to be less straightforward than they would have hoped.
"Other evidence supports a role for distinctiveness, including the finding that older people, known to benefit less from distinctive processing in other situations, show smaller production effect than younger people." (392) Relative distinctiveness has been the explanation that has dominated the production effect currently, however, it has it's limitations. "For one, there is the between-lists production ef- fect to contend with. By an alternative strength account, production might enhance the strength of items in memory (more specifically, their familiarity), which would occur both within-list and between-lists designs." (393)
These lists help people remember due to the ex- perientee's relationship to how familiar it may or may not be There were a couple unresolved issues after completing their experiment. They wondered why production improves recognition and cued recall but not free recall. A possibility is that “free recall leads participants to emphasize a strategy of retrieving relational/order informa- tion rather than a strategy of applying a production-based distinctiveness heuristic."(393) The evidence is "consistent with the idea that producing material at the time of encoding makes that material distinctive, which in turn enhances memory."(393) Distinctive material in turn enhances memory due to the time of encoding.
The question is why does the distinctive ma- terial enhance memory that is free rather than cued recall. They came up with an idea for the future. "Therefore, future research should be exam- ined whether production effects might occur on other implicit memory tasks."(393) This ex- periment did not exactly decide which method helps to better one's memory. At the end, their findings did not lead them to one over the other. They do not know whether reading all of the words aloud help one remember them properly. They still need to explore whether the pro- duction effect can enhance other cognitive functions and processes, such as text comprehen- sion or decision making.
These are still open to research and further delving into experiments and research. The overall theories and questions and the procedure were well done but the results were less than desirable. They did not help come to a conclusion and answer the issues sur- rounding memory, as nothing was stated as fact. Those who conducted the experiments needed a better focused group surrounding the question of memory and a wider range of peo- ple. Different measures should have been taken when completing this study. The Production Effect is the sub sequential benefit to memory of having studied informa- tion aloud as opposed to silently. Experiments have explained this enhancement by suggest- ing that a word studied aloud acquires a distinctive encoding record and that recollecting this record supports identifying a word studied aloud as "old". It was testsed via a list. The find- ings were scattered and need to be further studied.
Critique of Production Effect in Memory by MacLeod & Bodner. (2022, Dec 09). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/a-critique-of-the-production-effect-in-memory-an-article-by-colin-macleod-and-glen-bodner-essay
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