Heuristic decision-making across adulthood

In general, research on aging and decision-making has grown in recent years. Yet, little work has investigated how reliance on classic heuristics may differ across adulthood. For example, younger adults rely on the availability of information from memory when judging the relative frequency of plane crashes versus car accidents, but it is unclear if older adults are similarly reliant on this heuristic. In the present study, participants aged 20-90 years old made judgments that could be answered by relying on five different heuristics: anchoring, availability, recognition, representativeness, and sunk-cost bias. We found no evidence of age-related differences in the use of the classic heuristics-younger and older adults employed anchoring, availability, recognition, and representativeness to equal degrees in order to make decisions. However, replicating past work, we found age-related differences in the sunk-cost bias-older adults were more likely to avoid this fallacy compared to younger adults. We explain these different patterns by drawing on the distinctive roles that stored knowledge and personal experience likely play across heuristics. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

A comparison of memories of fiction and autobiographical memories

People consume, remember, and discuss not only memories of lived experiences, but also events from works of fiction, such as books, movies, and TV shows. We argue that these memories of fiction represent an important category of event memory, best understood within an autobiographical memory framework. How do fictional events yield psychological realities even when they are known to be invented? We explored this question in three studies by comparing the memory content, phenomenological qualities, and functional roles of naturally occurring personal memories to memories of fiction. In Studies 1 and 2, we characterized the subjective experience of memories of fiction by adapting established measures of autobiographical remembering, such as the Autobiographical Memory Questionnaire (Rubin et al., 2003), Centrality of Event Scale (Berntsen & Rubin, 2006), and items from the Thinking About Life Experiences Scale (Bluck et al., 2005; Pillemer et al., 2015). In Study 3, we investigated similarities and differences in personal memories and memories of fiction for events from childhood or the recent past. In doing so, we observed the impact of a unique property of memories of fiction: their ability to be repeatedly reexperienced in their original form. Taken together, we argue that memories of fiction can be considered similar to other forms of autobiographical remembering and describe a theoretical framework for understanding memories of fiction in the context of other event memories. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Individual Differences in Structure Building: Impacts on Comprehension and Learning, Theoretical Underpinnings, and Support for Less Able Structure Builders

In this article, we highlight an underappreciated individual difference: structure building. Structure building is integral to many everyday activities and involves creating coherent mental representations of conversations, texts, pictorial stories, and other events. People vary in this ability in a way not generally captured by other better known concepts and individual difference measures. Individuals with lower structure-building ability consistently perform worse on a range of comprehension and learning measures than do individuals with higher structure-building ability, both in the laboratory and in the classroom. Problems include a range of comprehension processes, including encoding factual content, inhibiting irrelevant information, and constructing a cohesive situation model of a text or conversation. Despite these problems, recent research is encouraging in that techniques to improve the learning outcomes for low-ability structure builders have been identified. We argue that the accumulated research warrants the recognition of structure building as an important individual difference in cognitive functioning and that additional theoretical work is needed to understand the underpinnings of structure-building deficits.

Meal skipping and cognition along a spectrum of restrictive eating

OBJECTIVE

Inadequate nutrition adversely impacts brain development and cognitive functioning (Pollitt et al., 1983). Studies examining the acute impact of eating regular meals on cognition have reported inconsistent findings, necessitating the exploration of individual differences in samples contributing to equivocal results. The present study examines the impact of skipping lunch on cognitive ability in college-aged students by including eating restraint as a moderator.

METHODS

Participants were 99 college-aged students (M = 19.7 years, SD = 1.5) randomized to a blinded 'lunch' or 'lunch-omission' condition, and assessed on memory, attention, processing speed, set shifting, and eating disorder symptomology.

RESULTS

Regressing long and short-term memory on the lunch manipulation, eating restraint scores, and their interaction revealed significant interactions: those who had lunch had superior memory performance, but only for those reporting lower levels of eating restraint. Regressing set shifting speed on the manipulation, those who had lunch had slower set shifting speed than those who skipped, but only for those reporting lower levels of eating restraint.

CONCLUSIONS

Results suggest that skipping lunch may have immediate consequences on cognition, however, cognitive enhancing effects may be diminished in the presence of even low levels of eating restraint. Findings highlight the significance of purported subclinical levels of eating restraint and may inform health education strategies.

Judging Truth

Deceptive claims surround us, embedded in fake news, advertisements, political propaganda, and rumors. How do people know what to believe? Truth judgments reflect inferences drawn from three types of information: base rates, feelings, and consistency with information retrieved from memory. First, people exhibit a bias to accept incoming information, because most claims in our environments are true. Second, people interpret feelings, like ease of processing, as evidence of truth. And third, people can (but do not always) consider whether assertions match facts and source information stored in memory. This three-part framework predicts specific illusions (e.g., truthiness, illusory truth), offers ways to correct stubborn misconceptions, and suggests the importance of converging cues in a post-truth world, where falsehoods travel further and faster than the truth.

An initial accuracy focus prevents illusory truth

News stories, advertising campaigns, and political propaganda often repeat misleading claims, increasing their persuasive power. Repeated statements feel easier to process, and thus truer, than new ones. Surprisingly, this illusory truth effect occurs even when claims contradict young adults' stored knowledge (e.g., repeating The fastest land animal is the leopard makes it more believable). In four experiments, we tackled this problem by prompting people to behave like "fact checkers." Focusing on accuracy at exposure (giving initial truth ratings) wiped out the illusion later, but only when participants held relevant knowledge. This selective benefit persisted over a delay. Our findings inform theories of how people evaluate truth and suggest practical strategies for coping in a "post-truth world."

Retrieval-Based Learning in Children

Testing oneself with flash cards, using a clicker to respond to a teacher’s questions, and teaching another student are all effective ways to learn information. These learning strategies work, in part, because they require the retrieval of information from memory, a process known to enhance later memory. However, little research has directly examined retrieval-based learning in children. We review the emerging literature on the benefits of retrieval-based learning for preschool and elementary school students and draw on other literatures for further insights. We reveal clear evidence for the benefits of retrieval-based learning in children (starting in infancy). However, we know little about the developmental trajectory. Overall, the benefits are largest when the initial retrieval practice is effortful but successful.

Neural basis of goal-driven changes in knowledge activation

Depending on a person's goals, different aspects of stored knowledge are accessed. Decades of behavioral work document the flexible use of knowledge, but little neuroimaging work speaks to these questions. We used representational similarity analysis to investigate whether the relationship between brain activity and semantic structure of statements varied in two tasks hypothesized to differ in the degree to which knowledge is accessed: judging truth (semantic task) and judging oldness (episodic task). During truth judgments, but not old/new recognition judgments, a left-lateralized network previously associated with semantic memory exhibited correlations with semantic structure. At a neural level, people activate knowledge representations in different ways when focused on different goals. The present results demonstrate the potential of multivariate approaches in characterizing knowledge storage and retrieval, as well as the ways that it shapes our understanding and long-term memory.

Retrieving and applying knowledge to different examples promotes transfer of learning

Introducing variability during learning often facilitates transfer to new contexts (i.e., generalization). The goal of the present study was to explore the concept of variability in an area of research where its effects have received little attention: learning through retrieval practice. In four experiments, we investigated whether retrieval practice with different examples of a concept promotes greater transfer than repeated retrieval practice with the same example. Participants watched video clips from a lecture about geological science and answered application questions about concepts: either the same question three times or three different questions. Experiments 3 and 4 also included conditions that involved repeatedly studying the information in the application questions (either the same example or three different examples). Two days later, participants took a final test with new application questions. All four experiments showed that variability during retrieval practice produced superior transfer of knowledge to new examples. Experiments 3 and 4 also showed a testing effect and a benefit from studying different examples. Overall, these findings suggest that repeatedly retrieving and applying knowledge to different examples is a powerful method for acquiring knowledge that will transfer to a variety of new contexts. (PsycINFO Database Record

Family Matters: Measuring Impact Through One's Academic Descendants

Scientific contributions take many forms, not all of which result in fame or are captured in traditional metrics of success (e.g., h factor). My focus is on one of the most lasting and important contributions a scientist can make: training scientists who go on to train scientists, who in turn train more scientists, etc. Academic genealogies provide many examples of scientists whose names might not be recognizable today but who trained psychologists that went on to publish very influential work. Of course success results from a combination of many factors (including but not limited to the student's abilities and motivation, luck, institutional resources, mentoring, etc.), but the field should find more ways to acknowledge the role that mentoring does play.

Competing cues: Older adults rely on knowledge in the face of fluency

Consumers regularly encounter repeated false claims in political and marketing campaigns, but very little empirical work addresses their impact among older adults. Repeated statements feel easier to process, and thus more truthful, than new ones (i.e., illusory truth). When judging truth, older adults' accumulated general knowledge may offset this perception of fluency. In two experiments, participants read statements that contradicted information stored in memory; a post-experimental knowledge check confirmed what individual participants knew. Unlike young adults, older adults exhibited illusory truth only when they lacked knowledge about claims. This interaction between knowledge and fluency extends dual-process theories of aging. (PsycINFO Database Record

Retelling Is Not the Same as Recalling

In contrast to laboratory free recall (which emphasizes detailed and accurate remembering), conversational retellings depend upon the speaker's goals, the audience, and the social context more generally. Because memories are frequently retrieved in social contexts, retellings of events are often incomplete or distorted, with consequences for later memory. Selective rehearsal contributes to the memory effects, as does the schema activated during retelling. Retellings can be linked to memory errors observed in domains such as eyewitness testimony and flashbulb memories; in all of these situations, people retell events rather than engage in verbatim remembering.

Expertise effects in the Moses illusion: detecting contradictions with stored knowledge

People frequently miss contradictions with stored knowledge; for example, readers often fail to notice any problem with a reference to the Atlantic as the largest ocean. Critically, such effects occur even though participants later demonstrate knowing the Pacific is the largest ocean (the Moses Illusion) [Erickson, T. D., & Mattson, M. E. (1981). From words to meaning: A semantic illusion. Journal of Verbal Learning & Verbal Behavior, 20, 540-551]. We investigated whether such oversights disappear when erroneous references contradict information in one's expert domain, material which likely has been encountered many times and is particularly well-known. Biology and history graduate students monitored for errors while answering biology and history questions containing erroneous presuppositions ("In what US state were the forty-niners searching for oil?"). Expertise helped: participants were less susceptible to the illusion and less likely to later reproduce errors in their expert domain. However, expertise did not eliminate the illusion, even when errors were bolded and underlined, meaning that it was unlikely that people simply skipped over errors. The results support claims that people often use heuristics to judge truth, as opposed to directly retrieving information from memory, likely because such heuristics are adaptive and often lead to the correct answer. Even experts sometimes use such shortcuts, suggesting that overlearned and accessible knowledge does not guarantee retrieval of that information.

On Known Unknowns: Fluency and the Neural Mechanisms of Illusory Truth

The "illusory truth" effect refers to the phenomenon whereby repetition of a statement increases its likelihood of being judged true. This phenomenon has important implications for how we come to believe oft-repeated information that may be misleading or unknown. Behavioral evidence indicates that fluency, the subjective ease experienced while processing information, underlies this effect. This suggests that illusory truth should be mediated by brain regions previously linked to fluency, such as the perirhinal cortex (PRC). To investigate this possibility, we scanned participants with fMRI while they rated the truth of unknown statements, half of which were presented earlier (i.e., repeated). The only brain region that showed an interaction between repetition and ratings of perceived truth was PRC, where activity increased with truth ratings for repeated, but not for new, statements. This finding supports the hypothesis that illusory truth is mediated by a fluency mechanism and further strengthens the link between PRC and fluency.

Knowledge does not protect against illusory truth

In daily life, we frequently encounter false claims in the form of consumer advertisements, political propaganda, and rumors. Repetition may be one way that insidious misconceptions, such as the belief that vitamin C prevents the common cold, enter our knowledge base. Research on the illusory truth effect demonstrates that repeated statements are easier to process, and subsequently perceived to be more truthful, than new statements. The prevailing assumption in the literature has been that knowledge constrains this effect (i.e., repeating the statement "The Atlantic Ocean is the largest ocean on Earth" will not make you believe it). We tested this assumption using both normed estimates of knowledge and individuals' demonstrated knowledge on a postexperimental knowledge check (Experiment 1). Contrary to prior suppositions, illusory truth effects occurred even when participants knew better. Multinomial modeling demonstrated that participants sometimes rely on fluency even if knowledge is also available to them (Experiment 2). Thus, participants demonstrated knowledge neglect, or the failure to rely on stored knowledge, in the face of fluent processing experiences.

Understanding How Prior Knowledge Influences Memory in Older Adults

Older adults have a harder time than younger adults remembering specific events and experiences (episodic memory), whereas the ability to use one's general knowledge either improves or remains stable over the life span. Our focus is on the sometimes overlooked but critical possibility that this intact general knowledge can facilitate older adults' episodic memory performance. After reviewing literature that shows how prior knowledge can support remembering in aging as well as lead it astray, we consider open questions including whether prior knowledge is used only to fill in the gaps after a memory failure and when older adults might need to be instructed to apply their prior knowledge. Overall, we situate our claims within theories of cognitive aging, arguing that prior knowledge is a key factor in understanding older adults' memory performance, with the potential to serve as a compensatory mechanism.

Learning misinformation from fictional sources: understanding the contributions of transportation and item-specific processing

People often pick up incorrect information about the world from movies, novels and other fictional sources. The question asked here is whether such sources are a particularly potent source of misinformation. On the one hand, story-reading involves transportation into a fictional world, with a possible reduction in access to one's prior knowledge (likely reducing the chances that the reader will notice errors). On the other hand, stories encourage relational processing as readers create mental models, decreasing the likelihood that they will encode and remember more peripheral details like erroneous facts. To test these ideas, we examined suggestibility after readers were exposed to misleading references embedded in stories and lists that were matched on a number of dimensions. In two experiments, suggestibility was greater following exposure to misinformation in a list of sentences rather than a coherent story, even though the story was rated as more engaging than the list. Furthermore, processing the story with an item-specific processing task (inserting missing letters) increased later suggestibility, whereas this task had no impact on suggestibility when misinformation was presented within a list. The type of processing used when reading a text affects suggestibility more than engagement with the text.

Neural correlates of retrieval-based memory enhancement: an fMRI study of the testing effect

Restudying material is a common method for learning new information, but not necessarily an effective one. Research on the testing effect shows that practice involving retrieval from memory can facilitate later memory in contrast to passive restudy. Despite extensive behavioral work, the brain processes that make retrieval an effective learning strategy remain unclear. In the present experiment, we explored how initially retrieving items affected memory a day later as compared to a condition involving traditional restudy. In contrast to restudy, initial testing that contributed to future memory success was associated with engagement of several regions including the anterior hippocampus, lateral temporal cortices, and medial prefrontal cortex (PFC). Additionally, testing enhanced hippocampal connectivity with ventrolateral PFC and midline regions. These findings indicate that the testing effect may be contingent on processes that are typically thought to support memory success at encoding (e.g. relational binding, selection and elaboration of semantically-related information) in addition to those more often associated with retrieval (e.g. memory search).

Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques

Many students are being left behind by an educational system that some people believe is in crisis. Improving educational outcomes will require efforts on many fronts, but a central premise of this monograph is that one part of a solution involves helping students to better regulate their learning through the use of effective learning techniques. Fortunately, cognitive and educational psychologists have been developing and evaluating easy-to-use learning techniques that could help students achieve their learning goals. In this monograph, we discuss 10 learning techniques in detail and offer recommendations about their relative utility. We selected techniques that were expected to be relatively easy to use and hence could be adopted by many students. Also, some techniques (e.g., highlighting and rereading) were selected because students report relying heavily on them, which makes it especially important to examine how well they work. The techniques include elaborative interrogation, self-explanation, summarization, highlighting (or underlining), the keyword mnemonic, imagery use for text learning, rereading, practice testing, distributed practice, and interleaved practice.

To offer recommendations about the relative utility of these techniques, we evaluated whether their benefits generalize across four categories of variables: learning conditions, student characteristics, materials, and criterion tasks. Learning conditions include aspects of the learning environment in which the technique is implemented, such as whether a student studies alone or with a group. Student characteristics include variables such as age, ability, and level of prior knowledge. Materials vary from simple concepts to mathematical problems to complicated science texts. Criterion tasks include different outcome measures that are relevant to student achievement, such as those tapping memory, problem solving, and comprehension.

We attempted to provide thorough reviews for each technique, so this monograph is rather lengthy. However, we also wrote the monograph in a modular fashion, so it is easy to use. In particular, each review is divided into the following sections: General description of the technique and why it should work How general are the effects of this technique?  2a. Learning conditions  2b. Student characteristics  2c. Materials  2d. Criterion tasks Effects in representative educational contexts Issues for implementation Overall assessment

The review for each technique can be read independently of the others, and particular variables of interest can be easily compared across techniques.

To foreshadow our final recommendations, the techniques vary widely with respect to their generalizability and promise for improving student learning. Practice testing and distributed practice received high utility assessments because they benefit learners of different ages and abilities and have been shown to boost students’ performance across many criterion tasks and even in educational contexts. Elaborative interrogation, self-explanation, and interleaved practice received moderate utility assessments. The benefits of these techniques do generalize across some variables, yet despite their promise, they fell short of a high utility assessment because the evidence for their efficacy is limited. For instance, elaborative interrogation and self-explanation have not been adequately evaluated in educational contexts, and the benefits of interleaving have just begun to be systematically explored, so the ultimate effectiveness of these techniques is currently unknown. Nevertheless, the techniques that received moderate-utility ratings show enough promise for us to recommend their use in appropriate situations, which we describe in detail within the review of each technique.

Five techniques received a low utility assessment: summarization, highlighting, the keyword mnemonic, imagery use for text learning, and rereading. These techniques were rated as low utility for numerous reasons. Summarization and imagery use for text learning have been shown to help some students on some criterion tasks, yet the conditions under which these techniques produce benefits are limited, and much research is still needed to fully explore their overall effectiveness. The keyword mnemonic is difficult to implement in some contexts, and it appears to benefit students for a limited number of materials and for short retention intervals. Most students report rereading and highlighting, yet these techniques do not consistently boost students’ performance, so other techniques should be used in their place (e.g., practice testing instead of rereading).

Our hope is that this monograph will foster improvements in student learning, not only by showcasing which learning techniques are likely to have the most generalizable effects but also by encouraging researchers to continue investigating the most promising techniques. Accordingly, in our closing remarks, we discuss some issues for how these techniques could be implemented by teachers and students, and we highlight directions for future research.

Memorial consequences of testing school-aged children

A large literature shows that retrieval practice is a powerful tool for enhancing learning and memory in undergraduates (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006a). Much less work has examined the memorial consequences of testing school-aged children. Our focus is on multiple-choice tests, which are potentially problematic since they minimise retrieval practice and also expose students to errors (the multiple-choice lures). To examine this issue, second graders took a multiple-choice general knowledge test (e.g., What country did the Pilgrims come from: England, Germany, Ireland, or Spain?) and later answered a series of short answer questions, some of which corresponded to questions on the earlier multiple-choice test. Without feedback, the benefits of prior testing outweighed the costs for easy questions. However, for hard questions, the large increase in multiple-choice lure answers on the final test meant that the cost of prior testing outweighed the benefits when no feedback was provided. This negative testing effect was eliminated when children received immediate feedback (consisting of the correct answer) after each multiple-choice selection. Implications for educational practice are discussed.

Inferring facts from fiction: reading correct and incorrect information affects memory for related information

People can acquire both true and false knowledge about the world from fictional stories. The present study explored whether the benefits and costs of learning about the world from fictional stories extend beyond memory for directly stated pieces of information. Of interest was whether readers would use correct and incorrect story references to make deductive inferences about related information in the story, and then integrate those inferences into their knowledge bases. Participants read stories containing correct, neutral, and misleading references to facts about the world; each reference could be combined with another reference that occurred in a later sentence to make a deductive inference. Later they answered general knowledge questions that tested for these deductive inferences. The results showed that participants generated and retained the deductive inferences regardless of whether the inferences were consistent or inconsistent with world knowledge, and irrespective of whether the references were placed consecutively in the text or separated by many sentences. Readers learn more than what is directly stated in stories; they use references to the real world to make both correct and incorrect inferences that are integrated into their knowledge bases.

Using verification feedback to correct errors made on a multiple-choice test

A key educational challenge is how to correct students' errors and misconceptions so that they do not persist. Simply labelling an answer as correct or incorrect on a short-answer test (verification feedback) does not improve performance on later tests; error correction requires receiving answer feedback. We explored the generality of this conclusion and whether the effectiveness of verification feedback depends on the type of test with which it is paired. We argue that, unlike for short-answer tests, learning whether one's multiple-choice selection is correct or incorrect should help participants narrow down the possible answers and identify specific lures as false. To test this proposition we asked participants to answer a series of general knowledge multiple-choice questions. They received no feedback, answer feedback, or verification feedback, and then took a short-answer test immediately and two days later. Verification feedback was just as effective as answer feedback for maintaining correct answers. Importantly, verification feedback allowed learners to correct more of their errors than did no feedback, although it was not as effective as answer feedback. Overall, verification feedback conveyed information to the learner, which has both practical and theoretical implications.

Creating illusions of knowledge: learning errors that contradict prior knowledge

Most people know that the Pacific is the largest ocean on Earth and that Edison invented the light bulb. Our question is whether this knowledge is stable, or if people will incorporate errors into their knowledge bases, even if they have the correct knowledge stored in memory. To test this, we asked participants general-knowledge questions 2 weeks before they read stories that contained errors (e.g., "Franklin invented the light bulb"). On a later general-knowledge test, participants reproduced story errors despite previously answering the questions correctly. This misinformation effect was found even for questions that were answered correctly on the initial test with the highest level of confidence. Furthermore, prior knowledge offered no protection against errors entering the knowledge base; the misinformation effect was equivalent for previously known and unknown facts. Errors can enter the knowledge base even when learners have the knowledge necessary to catch the errors.

Ironic effects of drawing attention to story errors

Readers learn errors embedded in fictional stories and use them to answer later general knowledge questions (Marsh, Meade, & Roediger, 2003). Suggestibility is robust and occurs even when story errors contradict well-known facts. The current study evaluated whether suggestibility is linked to participants' inability to judge story content as correct versus incorrect. Specifically, participants read stories containing correct and misleading information about the world; some information was familiar (making error discovery possible), while some was more obscure. To improve participants' monitoring ability, we highlighted (in red font) a subset of story phrases requiring evaluation; readers no longer needed to find factual information. Rather, they simply needed to evaluate its correctness. Readers were more likely to answer questions with story errors if they were highlighted in red font, even if they contradicted well-known facts. Although highlighting to-be-evaluated information freed cognitive resources for monitoring, an ironic effect occurred: Drawing attention to specific errors increased rather than decreased later suggestibility. Failure to monitor for errors, not failure to identify the information requiring evaluation, leads to suggestibility.

Receiving right/wrong feedback: consequences for learning

Prior work suggests that receiving feedback that one's response was correct or incorrect (right/wrong feedback) does not help learners, as compared to not receiving any feedback at all (Pashler, Cepeda, Wixted, & Rohrer, 2005). In three experiments we examined the generality of this conclusion. Right/wrong feedback did not aid error correction, regardless of whether participants learned facts embedded in prose (Experiment 1) or translations of foreign vocabulary (Experiment 2). While right/wrong feedback did not improve the overall retention of correct answers (Experiments 1 and 2), it facilitated retention of low-confidence correct answers (Experiment 3). Reviewing the original materials was very useful to learners, but this benefit was similar after receiving either right/wrong feedback or no feedback (Experiments 1 and 2). Overall, right/wrong feedback conveys some information to the learner, but is not nearly as useful as being told the correct answer or having the chance to review the to-be-learned materials.

Creating Illusions of Past Encounter Through Brief Exposure

Titchener (1928) suggested that briefly glancing at a scene could make it appear strangely familiar when it was fully processed moments later. The closest laboratory demonstration used words as stimuli, and showed that briefly glancing at a to-be-judged word increased the subject's belief that it had been presented in an earlier study list ( Jacoby & Whitehouse, 1989 ). We evaluated whether a hasty glance could elicit a false belief in a prior encounter, from a time and place outside of the experiment. This goal precluded using word stimuli, so we had subjects evaluate unfamiliar symbols. Each symbol was preceded by a brief exposure to an identical symbol, a different symbol, or no symbol. A brief glance at an identical symbol increased attributions to preexperimental experience, relative to a glance at a different symbol or no symbol, providing a possible mechanism for common illusions of false recognition.