Our results also confirm the previous finding that verbal material that is self-generated is more

accurately remembered than material that is passively read whether it is in health or disease states (Slamecka and Graf 1978; Schefft et al. 2008b). However, in the specific case of paired associates, this self-generation effect differed depending on the linguistic relationship between the word pair. Generated words were significantly Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical better remembered than read words in the synonym and opposite relationships, and somewhat in the category and association relationships while no recognition difference existed between read and generated words in the rhyme condition. Together, this provides support for Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical our hypothesis that the choice of linguistic relationship has implications for memory. As discussed above, several theories were proposed to explain the memory improvement associated

with self-generation. This pattern can be attributed to the active participation that the individual is taking in achieving a task (Schefft et al. 2008b). The active learning process leads to improved Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical mood state and self-esteem, and greater generalization of new knowledge (Schefft and Biederman 1990; Basso et al. 1994; Walsh et al. 1995). McDaniel et al. (1988) posited that self-generation improves memory because there is a heightened particularity in the items that need to be remembered. Another theory hypothesized that memory of information is enhanced when people feel self-empowered by generating that information on their own (Olofsson and Nilsson 1992;

Walsh et al. 1995). In addition, generating a word with deleted letters presents an interruption of automatic selleck chem reading Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical processes, requiring an additional amount of conscious processing (McDaniel et al. 1989) leading to better recall. Furthermore, it has also been suggested that increased memory Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical by way of self-generation is attributed to the depth of processing of the semantic information, rather than structural or phonological information (Craik and Tulving 1975; Craik 2002; Lespinet-Najib et al. 2004). The different effects found on recognition memory for each linguistic relationship support Cilengitide the notion that deeper semantic processing enhances memory performance (Craik and Tulving 1975; Craik 2002; Lespinet-Najib et al. 2004); and semantic and phonological relationships among words are processed by separate memory mechanisms (Martin et al. 1999), or at least require different cognitive resources (Menenti et al. 2012). Rhyming word pairs employs phonetic knowledge to self-generate a missing word according to how the words sound, while generating other types of related word pairs, such as categories, synonyms, opposites, and associations, employs semantic knowledge of what the word actually means (Craik and Tulving 1975; Martin et al. 1999; Kircher et al. 2011).