To study the effects of motivation on cognition, 55 fifth- and sixth-grade students were randomly assigned to 3 motivational treatment groups: (1) ego-involved (ability oriented); (2) task-involved (mastery oriented); and (3) control (no orientation). The ego-involvement treatment attempted to make subjects feel that their abilities on the tasks were being judged and compared to those of other subjects. The task-involvement treatment encouraged subjects to view any mistakes as challenges and to see the overcoming of these challenges as the end goal. The control treatment offered the subjects no interpretation of the tasks, leaving the subjects free to generate their own orientation toward the tasks. All subjects completed a computer task that required them to process 60 words at one "shallow" and two "deep" levels of processing through rhyming (shallow), categorization (deep), and sentence completion (deep). No differences existed between the treatment groups at the rhyming level of processing, but at the categorization and sentence-completion levels, the task-involved and control treatment groups recalled significantly more words than did the ego-involved group. This finding suggests that ego-involvement may be especially detrimental to learning that requires deeper levels of cognitive processing. Appendix A provides a transcript of experimental procedures, Appendix B lists the levels of processing of task items, and Appendix C includes the follow-up questions and the 60-item free recall measure used in the study. (SLD)