Article: Effects of mobilizing prior knowledge on information processing: studies of free recall and allocation of study time.

Which names would come to Dutch students' minds if they were asked to list as many US presidents as possible? They would probably mention Bush, Reagan, Kennedy, Nixon and a few other well-known presidents. If they were subsequently shown a list of US presidents' names in random order (Bush, Hayes, Coolidge, Nixon, Polk, Tyler, Reagan) and asked to recall the items on this list after a 20-minute delay, one might expect that they would recall their initial list better than the subsequent list. The basis for this expectation would be the so-called generation effect (Hirshman & Bjork, 1988; Nairne & Widner, 1987). This effect reflects the phenomenon that self-generated items ...

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