Developmental Changes in Differential Incentive Effects on Semantic Elaboration in Free Recall

Summary Words associated with two levels of semantic elaboration were paired with two levels of monetary rewards and tested through recall, to investigate incentive motivation effects on stimulus encoding. Experimental levels of elaboration were achieved by presenting to male and female Ss from grades 5, 8, and college orienting tasks requiring relatively more semantic elaboration for half of a list of verbal stimuli and relatively less for the rest. Results showed that orienting tasks moderated differentially by age the degree of semantic elaboration induced by high incentives. This finding suggested developmentally diminishing tendencies under differential motivation to fixate upon encodings which are relatively ineffective for long-term retention.