From Thought to Senses: Assessing the Relationship Between the Generation Effect and Multisensory Facilitation

The current study investigated whether the generation effect, a memory advantage for self-generated verbal information, is enhanced in multisensory conditions. Such a finding would be consistent with the multisensory facilitation effect, a phenomenon wherein multiple sensory inputs may reduce the cognitive load required to process and respond to co-occurring stimuli from multiple senses. Although extensive research has explored the generation effect, the multisensory aspect of this task has been overlooked. In the current study, we aimed to determine if the generation effect is modulated by the multisensory facilitation effect. Multisensory facilitation involves the brain’s ability to efficiently process information from diverse sensory sources simultaneously, enhancing cognitive performance. We employed a 2 (Task Type: generate, read) × 3 (Sensory Modality: auditory, visual, multisensory) factorial design, utilizing word pair lists and a cued recall test. A generation effect emerged for the auditory and audiovisual condition, but not for the visual condition. The hypothesis that the magnitude of the generation effect would be greater for the multisensory encoding condition was not supported. The current study addresses a gap in existing literature by examining the multisensory component of generation tasks and extends the current understanding of multisensory learning by incorporating verbal stimuli as the visual component.