SynthesisPsychonomic bulletin & review2020
Theories of the generation effect and the impact of generation constraint: A meta-analytic review.
Synthesis in Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- A Developmentally Informed Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Strength of General Psychopathology in Childhood and Adolescence.Clinical child and family psychology review · 2024Pooled it
- Investigating a mental effort explanation of the generation effect using pupillometry.Memory & cognition · 2026Article
- Graphic transmutations identify the phenomenon of meaningless pictures remembered as familiar objects.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Influence of congruency and social episodic memory on subsequent social decision-making.Memory & cognition · 2026Article
- Effects of stuttering and sound avoidance on reference production and memory.Applied psycholinguistics · 2026Article
- From Thought to Senses: Assessing the Relationship Between the Generation Effect and Multisensory Facilitation.Journal of cognition · 2026Article
- Does text generation improve learning from expository text? A conceptual replication attempt.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2025Article
- Exploring Whether Making Second-Language Vocabulary Learning Difficult Enhances Retention and Transfer.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Unitization Based Memory Enhancement in Younger and Older Adults.Journal of cognition · 2025Article
- Lower constraint testing enhances the testing effect for some contextual details but not others.Brain and behavior · 2024Article
- Evidence for a memory advantage for prosocial behaviors.Brain and behavior · 2023Article
- The reciprocal relationship between episodic memory and future thinking: How the outcome of predictions is subsequently remembered.Brain and behavior · 2022Article
- Exploring the relationship between retrieval practice, self-efficacy, and memory.Memory & cognition · 2022Article
- Predicting and remembering the behaviors of social targets: how prediction accuracy affects episodic memory.BMC psychology · 2022Article
- Scalable Science Education via Online Cooperative Questioning.CBE life sciences education · 2022Article
- Examining the influence of brain stimulation to the medial prefrontal cortex on the self-reference effect in memory.Brain and behavior · 2021Article
- Value-directed memory effects on item and context memory.Memory & cognition · 2021Article
- Examining the relationship between generation constraint and memory.Memory & cognition · 2021Article
- STOP SHOUTING AT ME: The Influence of Case and Self-Referencing on Explicit and Implicit Memory.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Effects of Survival Processing on Item and Context Memory: Enhanced Memory for Survival-Relevant Details.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The generation effect is the memory benefit for self-generated compared with read or experimenter-provided information. In recent decades, numerous theories have been proposed to explain the memory mechanism(s) and boundary conditions of the generation effect. In this meta-analysis and theoretical review, we analyzed 126 articles (310 experiments, 1,653 estimates) to assess 7 prominent theories to determine which theories are supported by the existing literature. Because some theories focus on item memory (memory for the generated target) and others focus on context memory (memory for details associated with the generated target), we examined memory effects for both types of details (item, context) in this meta-analysis. Further, we assessed the influence of generation constraint (how constrained participants are to generate a certain response), which recent work has shown affects the magnitude of the generation effect. Overall, the results of this meta-analysis support some theoretical accounts, but not others, as explanatory mechanisms of the generation effect. Results further showed that generation constraint significantly moderates the magnitude of the generation effect, suggesting that this factor should be rigorously investigated in future work. Overall, this meta-analysis provides a review and examination of generation effect theories, and reveals important areas of future research.
Indexed as
Identifiers
32671573What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.