Active and passive memory: States, attitudes, and strategies

Six experiments examined the effect of active and passive processing strategies upon recall of verbal and figural material. The strategies were induced at three levels of instructional specificity, referred to as strategy states, strategy attitudes, and specified strategies. The defining attributes of active strategies were a high degree of task control combined with a high degree of self-involvement, whereas passive strategies were conversely defined by low degrees of task control and self-involvement. The tasks, including free and serial recall lists, text reproduction and reasoning tasks, varied in familiarity. In line with the expectations the results showed active strategies to be superior with moderately familiar tasks, and with reasonably precise strategy instructions. With unspecified strategy instructions, and with highly familiar and highly unfamiliar tasks, less difference between active and passive strategies was obtained. The superiority of active processing was thus found to depend both on type of task and on the specificity level of the strategies induced.