EXPRESS: On the Pervasive Effect of Word Frequency in Metamemory

Predictions of one’s future memory performance – judgments of learning (JOLs) – are based on the cues that learners regard as diagnostic of memory performance. One of these cues is word frequency or how often words are experienced in the language. It is not clear, however, whether word frequency would affect JOLs when other cues are also available. The current study aims to close this gap by testing whether objective and subjective word frequency affect JOLs in the presence of font size as an additional cue. Across three experiments, participants studied words that varied in word frequency (Experiment 1: high and low objective frequency; Experiment 2: a whole continuum from high to low objective frequency; Experiment 3: high and low subjective and objective frequency) and were presented in a large (48pt) or a small (18pt) font size, made JOLs, and completed a free recall test. Results showed that people based their JOLs on both word frequency and font size. We conclude that word frequency is an important cue that affects metamemory even in multiple-cue situations.

Expecting to teach a novel golf putting task did not enhance retention performance: A replication attempt of Daou and colleagues

While research has identified several practice variables that purportedly enhance motor learning, recent replication failures highlight the importance of conducting high-powered, pre-registered replications. The "expecting to teach" phenomenon was first reported in the motor learning literature by Daou and colleagues and suggested learners benefit from practicing with the understanding they will later need to teach the skill. The extant data have been mixed but generally positive. While expecting to teach has been shown to enhance motor learning of a golf putt, the mechanisms linked with this benefit are yet to be determined. As such, this study sought to replicate the expecting to teach effect and to extend those findings by exploring participants’ thought processes. Participants (N = 76) were randomly assigned to one of two groups in which they were told that they were learning a golf putt in order to 1) be tested on the skill or 2) teach the skill to another individual. On Day 1, participants completed pre-test putts, a pre-acquisition intrinsic motivation inventory (IMI), a 2-minute study of an instructional booklet, 50 practice putts and a post-acquisition IMI. During practice, participants were also afforded opportunities to continue studying the booklet and to complete additional putts. Participants returned 24 hours later to complete a retention, a transfer (50-cm longer golf-putt), and a free recall test, as well as a post-study survey to reveal thoughts they engaged in after practice but before (or during) the retention test. Similar to Daou et al., no significant differences were found with study time, number of acquisition putts, or motivation. However, golf-putting performance during retention resulted in no differences for radial error, g = -0.13 (95% C.I. [-0.55, 0.29]), between the two groups and no differences were shown for the recall test. The present study fails to replicate the benefits reported in the original experiments.

Expecting to teach a novel golf putting task did not enhance retention performance: A replication attempt of Daou and colleagues (2016;2016)

While research has identified several practice variables that purportedly enhance motor learning, recent replication failures highlight the importance of conducting high-powered, pre-registered replications. The “expecting to teach” phenomenon was first reported in the motor learning literature by Daou and colleagues and suggested learners benefit from practicing with the understanding they will later need to teach the skill. The extant data have been mixed but generally positive. While expecting to teach has been shown to enhance motor learning of a golf putt, the mechanisms linked with this benefit are yet to be determined. As such, this study sought to replicate the expecting to teach effect and to extend those findings by exploring participants’ thought processes. Participants (N = 76) were randomly assigned to one of two groups in which they were told that they were learning a golf putt in order to 1) be tested on the skill or 2) to teach the skill to another individual. On Day 1, participants completed pre-test putts, a pre-acquisition intrinsic motivation inventory (IMI), a 2-minute study of an instructional booklet, 50 practice putts and a post-acquisition IMI. During practice, participants were also afforded opportunities to continue studying the booklet and to complete additional putts. Participants returned 24-hours later to complete a retention, a transfer (50 cm longer golf-putt), and a free recall test, as well as a post-study survey to reveal thoughts they engaged in after practice but before (or during) the retention test. Similar to Daou et al., no significant differences were found with study time, number of acquisition putts, or motivation. However, golf-putting performance during retention resulted in no differences for radial error, g = −.13 (95%CI [−.55, .29]), between the two groups and no differences were shown for the recall test. The present study fails to replicate the benefits reported in the original experiments.

Neurofeedback helps to reveal a relationship between context reinstatement and memory retrieval

Theories of mental context and memory posit that successful mental context reinstatement enables better retrieval of memories from the same context, at the expense of memories from other contexts. To test this hypothesis, we had participants study lists of words, interleaved with task-irrelevant images from one category (e.g., scenes). Following encoding, participants were cued to mentally reinstate the context associated with a particular list, by thinking about the images that had appeared between the words. We measured context reinstatement with fMRI, and related this to performance on a free recall test that followed immediately afterwards. To increase sensitivity, we used a closed-loop neurofeedback procedure, whereby higher levels of context reinstatement (measured neurally) elicited increased visibility of the images from the studied context onscreen. Our goal was to create a positive feedback loop that amplified small fluctuations in mental context reinstatement, making it easier to experimentally detect a relationship between context reinstatement and recall. As predicted, we found that higher levels of neural context reinstatement were associated with better recall of words from the reinstated context, and worse recall of words from a different context. In a second experiment, we assessed the role of neurofeedback in identifying this brain-behavior relationship by presenting context images again but manipulating whether their visibility depended on neural context reinstatement. When neurofeedback was removed, the relationship between context reinstatement and memory retrieval disappeared. Together, these findings demonstrate a clear effect of context reinstatement on memory recall and suggest that neurofeedback can be a useful tool for characterizing brain-behavior relationships.Abbreviated titleNeurofeedback context

Studying texts in a second language: The importance of test type

Little is known about the extent to which information encoding and retrieval differ between materials studied in first and second language (L1 and L2). In this study we compared memory for short, expository texts in L1 and L2, tested with a free recall test and a true/false judgement test. Our results show that students performed at the same level on the recognition test in both languages but not on the free recall test, with much lower performance in L2 than in L1, defined here as the dominant language. The L2 recall cost suggests that students’ performance may be underestimated if they are exclusively tested with essay-type exams in L2.

The effects of test trial and processing level on immediate and delayed retention

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effects of test trial and processing level on immediate and delayed retention. A 2 × 2 × 2 mixed ANOVAs was used with two between-subject factors of test trial (single test, repeated test) and processing level (shallow, deep), and one within-subject factor of final recall (immediate, delayed). Seventy-six college students were randomly assigned first to the single test (studied the stimulus words three times and took one free-recall test) and the repeated test trials (studied the stimulus words once and took three consecutive free-recall tests), and then to the shallow processing level (asked whether each stimulus word was presented in capital letter or in small letter) and the deep processing level (whether each stimulus word belonged to a particular category) to study forty stimulus words. The immediate test was administered five minutes after the trials, whereas the delayed test was administered one week later. Results showed that single test trial recalled more words than repeated test trial in immediate final free-recall test, participants in deep processing performed better than those in shallow processing in both immediate and delayed retention. However, the dominance of single test trial and deep processing did not happen in delayed retention. Additional study trials did not further enhance the delayed retention of words encoded in deep processing, but did enhance the delayed retention of words encoded in shallow processing.

Social Identity: The Cause of Distinction Between Group-Reference and Self-Reference Effects

We used a subliminal priming procedure to explore whether or not the intensity of identity salience facilitates the advantage of memory in distinguishing between the strength of the group-reference effect and that of the self-reference effect. In Experiment 1 (N = 124), participants were primed with in-group, out-group, or combined salience conditions before encoding adjectives with reference to the in-group and out-group, and were then subsequently given a surprise free-recall test. These results showed that the intensity of social identity could predict the memory advantage of group-reference tasks; moreover, the memory effect of group-reference tasks was strongest in the combined salience condition compared with in-group or out-group salience alone. In Experiment 2 (N = 81), we used different referential conditions and found that the intensity of social identity changed with identity salience and was a possible cause of differences between the intensity of the group-reference effect and that of the self-reference effect.

False memory susceptibility is correlated with categorisation ability in humans

Our memory is often surprisingly inaccurate, with errors ranging from misremembering minor details of events to generating illusory memories of entire episodes. The pervasiveness of such false memories generates a puzzle: in the face of selection pressure for accuracy of memory, how could such systematic failures have persisted over evolutionary time? It is possible that memory errors are an inevitable by-product of our adaptive memories and that semantic false memories are specifically connected to our ability to learn rules and concepts and to classify objects by category memberships. Here we test this possibility using a standard experimental false memory paradigm and inter-individual variation in verbal categorisation ability. Indeed it turns out that the error scores are significantly negatively correlated, with those individuals scoring fewer errors on the categorisation test being more susceptible to false memory intrusions in a free recall test. A similar trend, though not significant, was observed between individual categorisation ability and false memory susceptibility in a word recognition task. Our results therefore indicate that false memories, to some extent, might be a by-product of our ability to learn rules, categories and concepts.