On the Role of Generation Rules in Moderating the Beneficial Effects of Errorful Generation

Abstract

Abstract. In participants’ learning of semantically related paired associates, such as whale-mammal, prior research has demonstrated that having participants first attempt to predict what the to-be-learned response to a given cue will be enhances subsequent cued recall of that response, even when such predictions are always wrong (e.g., Kornell et al., 2009 ). In six experiments, we evaluate the importance of such error-prone predictions having a semantic basis – versus an acoustic (rhyming) basis. Our results show that both semantic generation as well as semantically related materials seem necessary if errorful generation is to have positive effects; generation based on other rules and materials does not aid learning. Learners are not, however, metacognitively aware of such benefits of generating errors.