Interplay of the production and picture superiority effects: A signal detection analysis

Abstract

Three experiments explored the interaction between the production effect (greater memory for produced compared to non-produced study items) and the picture superiority effect (greater memory for pictures compared to words). Pictures and words were presented in a blocked (E1) or mixed (E2, E3) design, each accompanied by an instruction to silently name (non-produced condition) or quietly mouth (produced condition) the corresponding referent. Memory was then tested for all study items as well as an equal number of foil items using a speeded (E1, E2) or self-paced (E3) yes-no recognition task. Experiments 1, 2, and 3 all revealed a small but reliable production×stimulus interaction. Production was also found to result in a liberal shift in response bias that could result in the overestimation of the production effect when measured using hits instead of sensitivity. Together our findings suggest that the application of multiple distinctive processes at study produces an especially discriminative memory trace at test, more so than the summation of each process individually.

Keywords:

• Production effect
• Picture superiority effect
• Human memory
• Cognition

Acknowledgments

JMF was funded by a Killam Predoctoral Fellowship. CKQ was funded by an NSERC Vanier Canadian Graduate Scholarship and also holds an honorary Killam Predoctoral Fellowship. TLT was funded by an NSERC Operating Grant. The authors would like to thank Thanh Luu and Emily Nichols for their help implementing this project and Dr Colin MacLeod for sharing his thoughts on these experiments.

Notes

¹Dodson and Schacter (2001) referred to the use of a production trace to infer whether an item had been studied as the “distinctiveness heuristic”.

²We would like to thank Dr Jason Ozubko for suggesting this framing.

³Mouthing was selected as our production manipulation over “speaking aloud” because participants were run in adjacent rooms without any soundproofing. We were concerned that other participants would hear any vocalisation of the study items. MacLeod et al. (2010) have found mouthing to result in a reliable production effect so we do not expect this methodological feature to impact our interpretation.

⁴Comparison of the magnitude of the difference in response bias for the mouthed condition versus the silent condition in Experiments 1 and 2 revealed no difference, t(66) = 0.84, p>.40.