In many circumstances in everyday life, individuals offload information to external stores (e.g., shopping lists) to compensate for limitations in internal memory. When saving information externally, individuals tend to refrain from actively encoding an additional internal copy of the information, leading to a weakening of its internal trace. This…

Two experiments explored the search for pairs of faces in a disjunctive dual-target face search (DDTFS) task for unfamiliar face targets. The distinctiveness of the target was manipulated such that both faces were typical or distinctive or contained one typical and one distinctive target. Targets were searched for in arrays of eight faces. In…

When administering an in-class exam, a common decision that confronts every instructor is whether the exam format should be closed book or open book. The present review synthesizes research examining the effect of administering closed-book or open-book assessments on long-term learning. Although the overall effect of assessment format on learning…

Trauma victims often come to remember experiencing more trauma than they initially reported. Our experiments are the first to investigate a plausible mechanism for this memory amplification, namely, that people incorporate new details contained in post-event information (PEI) into their event memory. In Experiment 1, participants viewed traumatic…

Purpose: Previous studies have debated differences in spoken language processing between nonnative and native English speakers, often yielding varying and sometimes contradictory results. To address these discrepancies, we employed a comprehensive battery of tasks to compare auditory, speech, and memory processing between nonnative and native…

Increasingly, educators seek to teach and assess historical thinking. In the post-secondary environment, historical thinking skills are typically taught alongside historical fact, however there is a paucity of research on the relationship between historical thinking skills and knowledge of historical fact. The purpose of this study was to…

When memories of past rewarding experiences are distorted, are relevant decision-making preferences impacted? Although recent research has demonstrated the important role of episodic memory in value-based decision making, very few have examined the role of false memory in guiding novel decision making. The current study combined the pictorial…

We constructed 4 working memory recognition models to predict behavior in the local recognition task (also called change detection), in which both content (e.g., color) and context (e.g., location) information are necessary to make correct recognition decisions. The theoretical assumptions incorporated in the models come from crossing 2 contrasts:…

Feedback information can be a powerful influence on learning, yet there is currently insufficient understanding of the cognitive mechanisms responsible for these effects. In this exploratory study, students (N = 279) received teacher feedback on a practice exam paper, and a few days later we assessed the amount and type of feedback information…

Many previous studies observed that higher retrospective confidence ratings about memory performance were associated with shorter response times in memory test. Researchers often interpret response time as a measure of retrieval fluency which is an important cue utilized in confidence formation process. However, the drift diffusion model (DDM)…

Performance on homework questions was compared with performance on related exam questions querying the same fact or principle, was used to assess the effect of answering online homework questions on subsequent exam performance. A distinctive pattern of performance was found for some students in which superior performance on online homework…

Background: Findings from the testing effect literature suggest several ways to achieve testing effects in an authentic classroom, but few consider instructor workload, equity, and resources that determine feasibility and sustainability of testing effect methods in practice. Objective: To determine elements and procedures from the testing effect…

Aim/Purpose: This paper examines the potential of ChatGPT-assisted retrieval practice to enhance students' final exam performance. ChatGPT was utilized to generate questions and deliver timely feedback during retrieval practice, supporting learning in large class settings where providing personalized feedback is often challenging. Background:…

Using games in a classroom setting to help engagement and learning is becoming popular, but controlled investigations into the benefits of games are few. Games are potentially a way to incorporate retrieval practice into a class and garner subsequent benefits to memory. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether a board game assisted…

Previous research with adults has shown mixed findings regarding the correlation between specificity and detailedness within autobiographical memories, and their associations with depressive symptoms. However, minimal research has tested these links in adolescents, despite the importance of this developmental period. The present investigation…