Exploring the impact of elaborative rehearsal on mind wandering

Research suggests elaborative rehearsal encoding manipulations facilitate subsequent recall of to-be-learned information. Though there have been several proposed mechanisms to understand this effect, we wanted to explore whether elaborative rehearsal may additionally be understood to improve memory via a reduction in mind wandering during learning. In a pre-registered experiment, we had participants learn a list of sentences in which a person was tied to an arbitrary action. In the control condition, a plausible explanation was provided to link person and action while in the elaborative rehearsal condition, participants were tasked with generating their own explanation. During this list presentation, participants were presented with several probes to gauge whether their attention was on task or if instead their mind had wandered to off-task thoughts. Later, participants were given a cued-recall test in which they were asked to recall which person was associated with each action. Results revealed that participants in the elaborative rehearsal condition recalled more of the sentences and self-reported less mind wandering. However, contrary to predictions, the reductions in mind wandering did not mediate cued recall performance. We argue that these data suggest elaborative rehearsal improves memory primarily because of what it adds (rich, idiosyncratic retrieval paths) as opposed to what it suppresses.