<p>The present study compared the effects
of social and semantic elaboration on incidental memory. Two types of lists
were provided to the participants: (1) a related list, in which a triplet of
words had a common category name associated with each of them, and
(2) an unrelated list, in which the three words did not have a common category
name. Then, participants in the social elaboration condition generated a
particular person’s name, and those in the semantic elaboration condition
generated an association elicited by the three words. An unexpected free recall
task followed. Results indicated higher recall of the related list in the
social elaboration than in the semantic elaboration condition. In contrast, the
unrelated list showed no difference between the two elaboration conditions. These
results indicate that social elaboration functions as within-item elaboration,
which is more effective than semantic elaboration.</p>