https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721417691356 Current Directions in Psychological Science 2017, Vol. 26(4) 390–395 © The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0963721417691356 www.psychologicalscience.org/CDPS The “production effect” was named by MacLeod, Gopie, Hourihan, Neary, and Ozubko (2010) in a series of experiments in which the mere act of reading words aloud resulted in substantially better memory than read- ing them silently. Though recently coined, the produc- tion effect was not newly minted. Hopkins and Edwards (1972) initially reported the effect, but with a few excep- tions (e.g., Conway & Gathercole, 1987; MacDonald & MacLeod, 1998), it largely escaped attention over the intervening years. By contrast, the memorial benefits of other encoding strategies have been continuously and extensively researched since the 1970s, including the level of processing effect (Craik & Lockhart, 1972) and the generation effect (Slamecka & Graf, 1978). How did we overlook such a simple, intuitive encoding strat- egy? Perhaps the effect merely needed a name to make a name for itself. Since the delineation of the effect by MacLeod et al., at least 40 articles have appeared, including a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology (see Bodner & MacLeod, 2016). Our goals here are to briefly review what we have learned about the production effect from this recent research and to invite readers to pursue the unanswered questions. Extensions and Boundaries As is common for research on encoding strategies, much of what we know about the production effect comes from studies of memory for word lists. In a typi- cal experiment, people study a list of words shown one at a time with print color dictating whether a word is to be produced or read silently (e.g., blue = aloud; white = silent), and a memory test follows. Most studies have used intentional learning, but the effect also occurs with incidental learning (e.g., MacDonald & MacLeod, 1998). Figure 1 presents some illustrative data from MacLeod et al. (2010), who identified several con- ditions that yielded a production effect, including (a) saying words aloud, (b) silently mouthing words, and even (c) saying nonwords aloud. In terms of boundar- ies, they found no advantage from making nonunique productions for all produce-cued words, such as (d) saying “yes” to all of them. The effect was also absent when implicit memory was assessed using a speeded reading test. The production effect was initially thought to be absent when the two conditions were assigned between lists (usually to separate groups) rather than within list, as reported both by Hopkins and Edwards (1972) and by MacLeod et al. (2010). However, meta-analysis includ- ing these early studies by Fawcett (2013) in addition to more recent experiments beginning with Bodner, Taikh, and Fawcett (2014) have confirmed a between-lists pro- duction effect in recognition—although it is markedly smaller than the within-list effect (compare panels A and B in the hypothetical data presented in Fig. 2). 691356CDP XX X 10.1177/0963721417691356MacLeod, BodnerThe Production Effect research-article 2017 Corresponding Author: Colin M. MacLeod, Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3G1 Canada. E-mail: cmacleod@uwaterloo.ca The Production Effect in Memory Colin M. MacLeod 1 and Glen E. Bodner 2 1 University of Waterloo and 2 University of Calgary Abstract Producing items by means as simple as saying, writing, or typing them can yield substantial memory improvements relative to silent reading. We review the research on this production effect and outline some important extensions and boundary conditions. We also evaluate the evidence that production enhances the distinctiveness of items in memory during encoding, thereby facilitating their later retrieval. There are issues to resolve and areas to explore, but production offers a practical means of enhancing some forms of long-term, explicit memory. Keywords memory, encoding, retrieval, production, distinctiveness