A fundamental property of human memory is that repetition enhances memory. Peterson and Mulligan (2012) recently documented a surprising "negative repetition effect," in which participants who studied a list of cue-target pairs twice recalled fewer targets than a group who studied the pairs only once. Words within a pair rhymed, and…

Despite the clear long-term benefits of spaced practice, students and teachers often choose massed practice. Whether learners actually fail to appreciate the benefits of spacing is, however, open to question. Early studies (e.g., Zechmeister & Shaughnessy, 1980) found that participants' judgments of learning were higher after massed than after…

It sometimes happens that one is unable to recall a word or name that he feels he knows very well. This state of frustrated recall is referred to as a tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) experience. Two experiments were devised to compare the ability of a weak trace and a decoding-failure model to predict the conditions under which TOT reports would be most…

A relationship has been hypothesized between metamemory (the self-knowledge of memory processes that an individual can verbalize) and actual memory performance. To explore this relationship, a study was conducted, in partial replication of earlier studies, using the strategy choice paradigm for paired-associate learning (PAL) on a metamemory…

People sometimes forget a name or a word, and are plagued by the feeling that the sought-for word is somewhere in memory but not immediately available. The frequent description of this tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) phenomenon as subthreshold memory traces is challenged by data showing that TOT genesis and TOT recovery are distinct processes. In a verbal…

In this study, the self-reported strategies of fifth, seventh, and ninth grade subjects used to learn a list of paired associates were correlated with actual learning performance to test the hypothesis that proficient learners are elaborators. (Author/SB)