An Examination of the Factors that Determine the Effectiveness of Self-Choice Elaboration : On the Orienting Task and the Image of Sentence Frame

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether, or not, the type of orienting task (congruity and image) and the image of the sentence frame (image or nonimage) determined the occurrence of a self-choice elaboration effect on incidental memory. A self-choice elaboration effect refers to the superiority of self-choice elaboration to experimenter-provided elaboration. Two types of orienting tasks were provided: congruity task and image task. The subjects performed one of the two orienting tasks involving two conditions (choice and rating) followed by an unexpected free recall and cued recall tests. In the choice condition the subjects selected one sentence frame (from two) into which a specific target could fit more congruously or which, with a target, would arouse a more vivid image. In the rating condition the subjects were required to rate the congruity of each target to its sentence frame, or the vividness of the image that was aroused by each target and its sentence, on a 5-point scale. Two types of sentence frames were provided: image sentences and nonimage sentences. In the conguity task, the choice condition led to a better free recall than the rating condition in both types of sentence frames, namely a self-choice elaboration effect on incidental memory did occur. Whereas in image task, the choice condition led to a better free recall than the rating condition in nonimage sentence frames, but the difference of the two conditions was not observed in image sentence frames. These results were interpreted as showing that the type of orienting task and the image of the sentence frame were determinants of a self-choice elaboration effect on incidental memory