Eighty unique word pairs were learned during the first task session
(BEFORE the motivational interviewing manipulation/control rest period),
and eighty new pairs were learned during the second session
(AFTER the manipulation/control rest period). Each session consisted
of two learning phases with feedback, followed by a test phase without
feedback, in which the same 80 word pairs were presented in random
order, and the participants chose a match for the main word. During
learning phase 1, the guesses as to the correct match for the top word
were arbitrary, so the feedback during learning phase 1 was simply informative
and did not reflect personal efficacy on the task. During learning
phase 2, because the participants had previously been exposed to
the correct word pairs, the feedback reflected the accuracy of the participants'
memory in addition to providing information about the correct
response. The word pairs tested BEFORE the motivational interviewing
(MI) manipulation included only those pairs that were learned
BEFORE the MI manipulation, and those tested AFTER the MI manipulation
included only the 80 new word pairs that were introduced AFTER
the MI manipulation.