Elaborative Interrogation Facilitates Acquisition of Confusing Facts

We evaluated the potency of an elaborative procedure (elaborative interrogation) for fact learning. In particular, we compared it to another elaborative method (constructing imaginal representations) that is usually effective in mediating associative learning. Thus in four experiments, adults were presented sets of facts. The first two experiments involved sentences containing arbitrary information, essentially random pairings of subjects and predicates; the latter two experiments involved materials representing real-world associations, ones not known by subjects before the study, but ones that subjects might be able to rationalize on the basis of prior knowledge. In each of the experiments, subjects in the elaborative-interrogation condition constructed a reason why each fact made sense; subjects in the imagery condition constructed an internal imaginal representation of each fact; and reading-control subjects read the facts under an instruction to make certain that they understood each fact. Memory of the facts was consistently much better in the elaborative-interrogation and imagery conditions than in the reading-control condition; there were no reliable performance differences between the elaborative-interrogation and imagery conditions. Elaborative interrogation seems to be a powerful learning procedure that is generally useful during fact learning.