The Thin Red Line: Precise Elaboration

Below are two lists of sentences. The first list contains short sentences with the following structure: <definite article> <adjective> <subject> <verb> <article> <direct_object>. The second list contains long sentences with the same structure, plus an extra prepositional phrase (in italics) at the end that modifies the base sentence. 

After reading the sentences, suppose I were to give you a memory test. Which sentences do you think would be easier for you to remember? Why is that the case?

Short Sentences

1. The short man bought the broom. 
2. The old man used the paint.

3. The fat man looked at the warning.

Long Sentences

1. The short man bought the broom to operate the light switch.

2. The old man used the paint to change the color of his cane.

3. The fat man looked at the warning that said keep off the thin ice.

Many of the previous posts about memory talked about memorizing individual items, like numbers, letters, or words. While it is essential to be able to remember small bits of information, it is also important that we have the ability to remember longer, more complicated pieces of information. Reading often requires the ability to encode large blocks of complicated information. What kind of strategies exist to help boost our memory for sentences? 

Elaborative Processing

As stated previously, one strategy to boost your memory is to add supplemental information. It seems counter-intuitive that adding information would increase the likelihood of remembering because now you have more to remember! It works because the mind craves two things: order and redundancy.

To demonstrate, a pair of scientists constructed some cleverly-worded sentences and gave them to participants to read [1]. The first type of sentence, or base sentences, included two nouns connected by a verb. Here is an example: 

Base Sentence: The woman hit the butcher. 

For the second type of sentence, the scientists embellished the base sentences with some color commentary, like this:

Embellished Sentence: The woman hit the butcher with a sausage.

Half of the participants read the base sentences and the other half read the embellished sentences. After they studied the sentences, the experimenters then checked the accuracy of the participants' memory for the underlined words. You can probably guess the outcome of the experiment. If you guessed that the people who read the base sentences remembered fewer items (57%) than those who read the embellished sentences (72%), then you would be correct. The explanation was that the additional information helped create a rich context for remembering the other words in the sentence. The additional commentary helped glue everything together. 

"Doctor, isn’t that incision a bit high for an appendix?"

This is an interesting finding because it shows that our memories are sensitive to the information that surrounds the target information. However, the results left a couple of open questions. First, does the type of elaboration matter? By type I am referring to the relevance of the elaboration to the main sentence. An imprecise elaboration does not add relevant information. On the other hand, a precise elaboration adds information that is semantically connected to the base sentence. A precise elaboration, for example, might explain why being "thin" is relevant to the developing story. 

The second open question deals with the generation effect, which distinguishes between elaborations that are provided by someone else or that we generate ourselves. In the experiment described in the previous section on elaborative processing, the elaborations were provided by the experimenters. What if people were able to supply their own color commentary? Would that prove to enhance memory even more?

To test these questions, some other scientists wrote another set of cleverly-worded sentences that the they gave participants to study [2]. The sentences included the following four types:

1. Base sentence: The thin man picked up the scissors.
2. Imprecise-elaboration: The thin man picked up the scissors to cut the tag off his hat. 
3. Precise-elaboration: The thin man picked up the scissors to cut the belt in half.
4. Self-elaboration: The thin man picked up the scissors ______________.

There were two phases to the experiment. For the first phase, participants either read the sentences that they were given (base, imprecise-elaboration, or precise-elaboration sentences), or they read the base sentence and generated their own elaboration (self-elaboration). During the second phase of the experiment, participants were given the base sentence with the adjective removed (e.g., thin), and their job was to recall the missing word.

Before I describe the results, can you guess the order of the conditions in terms of their performance on the cued recall test?

Fig. 1: Results from the elaboration study.

As you can see from the graph, the individuals who read sentences that were imprecisely elaborated performed the worst. They recalled fewer adjectives than the participants in the other conditions of the experiment. The best performance was found in the group that read the precisely elaborated sentences, with the self-elaboration not too far behind. 

In summary, I guess it would be a mistake to say that merely adding additional information helps boost our memory. Instead, the additional information needs to be semantically relevant.

The STEM Connection

The research on elaboration has useful applications for education. First, textbooks should be written with the second study in mind. That is, textbook authors should strive to ensure that their elaborations are precisely worded and relevant to the material being presented. The goal is to create a coherent mental model for the reader. For example, it would be insufficient to say, "Hot air rises." because an explanatory mechanism is not mentioned. Instead, the reader is forced either to memorize this bit of information or supply their own explanation for why hot air rises. Self-generated elaborations aren't necessarily a bad thing (as we will see in a future post), but the reader might be lazy and neglect the intellectual work needed to understand the passage.

The second application is on the student side. Students should train themselves to supply their own explanatory or causal mechanism when it is missing. If a piece of text doesn't make sense or seems incomplete, the reader should ask, "Why does hot air rise?" This type of self-prompting is beneficial because the reader is effectively training herself to become more meta-cognitively aware.

The research behind elaborative processing and precisely worded elaborations is interesting because we've started to move past merely memorizing lists of words; however, we are still at the sentence level. The next goal is to figure out how we process larger chunks of texts – like entire paragraphs! 


Share and Enjoy!

Dr. Bob

For More Information

[1] Anderson, J. R., & Bower, G. H. (2014). Human associative memory. Psychology Press.

[2] Stein, B. S., & Bransford, J. D. (1979). Constraints on effective elaboration: Effects of precision and subject generation. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 18(6), 769-777.