The Incongruity Effect in Memory for Generated Targets: Fact or Artifact?

Two recent reports concluded that free recall for generated incongruous responses is superior to that for generated congruous responses (i.e., the target table generated in the context of Not a type of vegetable and A piece of furniture respectively). This incongruity effect is a reversal of the standard advantage for congruously encoded targets when all responses are provided by the experimenter. The research presented in this article shows that the incongruity effect is obtained when subjects are free to generate their own responses, but not when the generated response is predetermined. It is concluded that the incongruity effect is an artifact of idiosyncratic item selection effects.