Yes, there is some controversy as to the appropriateness of recycling one's previously published text and there are a number of arguments for and against such recycling. One argument against recycling one's own verbatim text lies in the notion that, for purposes of retention and better understanding of the message being conveyed, it is better to restate it in different words. The point being that the reader's effort in decoding an idea embodied in text different from that in which the original idea was previously expressed represents a deeper level of processing, relative to reading about verbatim from the original, which then results in a better memory of the material. I often discourage authors from recycling their own previously disseminated work, but I don't believe I have ever used the above argument. I am currently writing a paper and thought of adding that argument, but I only had a vague recollection of existing evidence in its favor. The article you have identified does seem to provide some support and I have since found some other ones that seem to also support the notion, but I have yet to read them thoroughly enough to make that determination. And, no, I have not found the one study that I thought had been carried out that directly addresses this issue. Frankly, I sometimes wonder whether at some unconscious level my mind imagines these studies and mistakenly processes these musings as (false) memories in a sort of deja vu-like manner. And it would not be the first time either! :)
Additional References Glover J. A., Plake B. S., Roberts B., Zimmer J. W., Palmers M. (1981) Distinctiveness of encoding: The effects of paraphrasing and drawing inferences on memory from prose. Journal of Educational Psychology, 73, 736–744. Hagaman, J. L., Casey, K. J., & Reid, R. (2012). The effects of the paraphrasing strategy on the reading comprehension of young students. Remedial and Special Education, 13(2), 110-123. Luftig R.L. (1982). Normalization in paraphrase and recall effects of processing grammatical article type and retention interval. Journal Of Psycholinguistic Research, 127-140. Miguel ________________________________________ From: Mike Palij [[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, September 27, 2016 12:42 PM To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) Cc: Michael Palij Subject: RE: [tips] Is memory better when message is conveyed with different words the second time around? Miguel, you're welcome. If you find the article that you originally were looking for and/or similar ones, would you please let us know? Also, originally you seemed to imply that this was involved somehow in plagiarism (sorry but I snipped that part out in my response). Can you expand on this point? At first I thought I saw where you were going in this area but now I'm not sure. The results below and similar results elsewhere (Delorosa & Bourse 1985; see my original post for full reference) suggest that when we lecture and present either a difficult concept/point or interpretation, we should perhaps first simply repeat what we said (to make sure that students heard the complete statement(s) we made and encode that) but then paraphrase it, putting the important words/concepts in a different arrangement or frame. Something like: (1) the independent groups t-test is used when you have a between- subjects design with two mean and want to determine whether the mean dependent variable is different at each level. (2) So, if we want to determine if two means that represent that dependent variable at the two levels of a between-subjects design are different, we use the independent groups t-test. Or something like that. ;-) -Mike Palij New York University [email protected] ---------- Original Message ---------- On Tue, 27 Sep 2016 04:31:17 -0700, Miguel Roig wrote: I just retrieved the paper in question and the following explanation from the authors sort of verifies what I had been thinking: "Recall of information in massed paraphrased repetitions was significantly greater than recall of information in massed verbatim repetitions of both visually and aurally presented information. Third, contrasts of verbatim and paraphrased materials in spaced repetitions conditions indicated no significant difference in recall. The results confirm those of Dellarosa and Bourne (1985) and extend them to a longer segment of prose and to aurally presented information". However, as with most psychological phenomena, 'it's complicated'. Further down in the discussion they elaborate their results as follows: "When massed paraphrased repetitions are considered, full encoding also should occur on each repetition. Paraphrased versions of the same material differ enough in surface structure so that the retrieval cues they offer are not sufficient for easy retrieval of the prior encoding. When retrieval of prior encodings fails, full-encoding processes occur. The resulting memory trace, then, should be equivalent to that observed in spaced repetitions. Paraphrased versions of material presented in spaced trials, however, should be no more effective than verbatim versions because full-encoding processes are required regardless of whether the repeated material is presented in verbatim or paraphrased versions". Thank you, Mike! --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=1632838.7e62b84813297f170a6fc240dab8c12d&n=T&l=tips&o=49531 or send a blank email to leave-49531-1632838.7e62b84813297f170a6fc240dab8c...@fsulist.frostburg.edu --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=49535 or send a blank email to leave-49535-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
