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The Generation Effect On Society Essay

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This essay is geared to establish and report findings based on the phenomenon manifested among a vast amount of experiments over the years, the generation effect. While there were many informative articles which slightly applied to the generation effect no true conclusion is reached, therefore this essay attempts to compile all ideas to come to one solid finding. The generation effect was developed as a part of memory research, and it states that individuals tend to recall words that they personally generated better than words participants were given. Since this phenomenon has been an important part in many studies yet seemed to have no true solid conclusion, in 1978, “Slamecka and Graf” conducted a series of experiments to test this hypothesis. As a result of previous experiments not having sufficient constraints, their first experiment the “generate” group was given the word on the left and the first letter of the word on the right along with a rule. The participants were then asked to generate a word that fit the given guidelines and proceed to read the word out loud. The “read” group was given a list of related words and were asked to read the words out loud. After a few trials the experimenters recorded how accurately each participant in each group remembered the word (read/ generated) on the right hand side. The meaning of memory, according to Merriam Webster, is the capability to retain, recall or to recollect a certain object, event or experience. In an article

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