Introduction to the Special Issue on “The Production Effect”

The production effect is a well-established phenomenon: if some words in a list are produced (e.g., by being read aloud or typed), they are better remembered than their nonproduced neighbors like those read silently. This effect has been investigated for more than half a century under various names including vocalization, pronunciation and modality effects (e.g., Hopkins & Edwards, 1972; Murray et al., 1974). However, in 2010, MacLeod et al. revived interest in this phenomenon and gave it a new, unifying name: the production effect. Six years later, such was the enthusiasm for this effect that the Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology devoted a special issue to it. It is now well-established that many production methods are effective and that the effects are present in many memory tasks including recall and recognition tasks over the short and long term, Overall, a complex but theoretically meaningful pattern of results emerged. This special issue is an opportunity to bring together the best empirical and theoretical work on the production effect.

From the list of authors who provided their Letter of Intend as a response to the Call for Papers published in Experimental Psychology 69(6), 2022, more than 15 authors followed the Guest Editor’s invitation to submit their manuscripts. The number of contributions gave us the possibility to present our readers a wide range of different aspects on that phenomenon and to publish in two journal issues. As will be seen, the field has grown so much that for this special issue we have a new meta-analysis, formal models of memory accounting for the effect, new implementations of the effect across development, bilingualism, spatial information, directed forgetting, false memory, implicit and explicit memory tasks, comprehension, and even a production that does not need to match study items. We hope you enjoy reading!