EFFECTS OF DECISION DIFFICULTY ON RECOGNITION AND RECALL

Four experiments explored the idea that differences in the difficulty of semantic judgments affect the subsequent retention of items involved in the judgments. In general, memory was better after more difficult decisions, although there were interactions with the form of the retention test. It is suggested that decision difficulty is positively related to the distinctiveness of the memorial record of the initial event, and that it is distinctiveness, rather than depth or elaboration, of the memory trace that underlies high levels of memorability. The major difference between distinctiveness and depth as explanatory concepts lies in the different views of meaning offered by the two accounts. In particular, the distinctiveness notion leads to a relativistic view of meaning, in that the meaning of an event is determined by the set of contrasts generated during initial processing. © 1979 Academic Press, Inc.