Is Learning With Elaborative Interrogation Less Desirable When Learners Are Depleted?

When learning with elaborative interrogation, learners are requested by means of prompts to generate parts of the study material. There is evidence, that learning with elaborative interrogation is beneficial. However, it is conceivable that for elaborative interrogation to be beneficial for learning, learners also need resources available to be able to correctly generate parts of the study material. In this connection, one potentially important factor for successfully carrying out such effortful analytic processes, like generating information, is cognitive self-control. However, self-control seems to be a limited resource that can be depleted. Hence, under conditions of depleted self-regulatory resources (ego depletion), elaborative interrogation might lead to an incomplete generation of the requested information, resulting in incomplete study material. Thus, elaborative interrogation may be only beneficial under nondepleted conditions, but disadvantageous under depleted conditions. To investigate this, 97 persons were randomly assigned to one of four conditions resulting from a 2 × 2 between-subjects design with the independent variables ego depletion (yes vs. no) and learning condition (elaborative interrogation vs. control). Ego depletion was manipulated with a writing task: Participants were instructed to transcribe a text on a blank sheet, but only participants in the depletion condition were instructed to omit the letters