People generate reminders in a variety of ways (e.g. putting items in special places or creating to-do lists) to support their memories. Successful remindings can result in retroactive facilitation of earlier information; in contrast, failures to remind can produce interference between memory for related information. Here, we compared the efficacy of different kinds of reminders, including participant’s self-generated reminders, reminders created by prior participants, and normatively associated reminders. Self-generated reminders boosted memory for the earlier target words more than normatively associated reminders in recall tests. Reminders generated by others enhanced memory as much as self-generated reminders when we controlled output order during recall. The results suggest that self-generated reminders boost memory for earlier studied information because they distinctly point towards the target information.

人们以多种方式生成提醒（例如，将物品放在特殊位置或创建待办事项列表）以支持他们的记忆。成功的提醒会导致对早期信息的追溯促进；相反，未能提醒可能会在内存之间干扰相关信息。在这里，我们比较了各种提醒的功效，包括参与者的自我生成的提醒，先前参与者创建的提醒以及规范上相关的提醒。与召回测试中与规范相关的提醒相比，自我生成的提醒增加了对早期目标单词的记忆。当我们在召回过程中控制输出顺序时，其他人生成的提醒会增强记忆，就像自我生成的提醒一样。