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Guessing an answer to an unfamiliar question prior to seeing the answer leads to better memory than studying alone (the pre-testing effect), which some theories attribute to increased curiosity. A similar effect occurs in general knowledge learning: people are more likely to recall information that they were initially curious to learn. Gruber and Ranganath [(2019). How curiosity enhances hippocampus-dependent memory: the prediction, appraisal, curiosity, and exploration (PACE) framework. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 23(12), 1014–1025] argued that unanswered questions can cause a state of curiosity during which encoding is enhanced for the missing answer, but also for incidental information presented at the time. If pre-testing similarly induces curiosity, then it too should produce better memory for incidental information. We tested this idea in three experiments that varied the order, nature and timing of the incidental material presented within a pre-testing context. All three experiments demonstrated a reliable pre-testing effect for the targets, but no benefit for the incidental material presented before the target. This pattern suggests that the pre-testing effect is highly specific and is not consistent with a generalised state of curiosity.

A number of studies indicate that meditation training affects performance on the attentional blink (AB). This is taken as evidence that meditation has an influence on attentional processes. One such experiment found the AB to be reduced after adult, non-meditators completed a brief, single session of open monitoring meditation (OM). This was compared to two control conditions: focused attention meditation (FA) and a relaxation condition in which participants read magazines. The objective of the present study was to assess whether this effect could be replicated with a larger sample. This experiment consisted of forty participants in each of three groups: FA, OM and relaxation. After the inductions, performance was measured on a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task consisting of two targets (T1 and T2). The AB and overall target accuracy were compared between groups using Bayesian and frequentist statistics. There was no evidence of attentional blink differences between the FA, OM and control conditions. However, overall task accuracy was higher in the meditation groups than in the relaxation group for both conditional T2 accuracy and T1 accuracy. The results indicate that in non-meditators, any reduction in attentional blink after brief OM, relative to brief FA, is likely to be small (d = 0.27 [− 0.17, 0.72]). In non-meditators, there was no evidence that brief OM affects attention allocation differently to FA, such that it reduces the attentional blink. However, brief meditation may affect the allocation of attentional resources in ways which improve accuracy on the attentional blink task. This interpretation is supported by evidence that, over the course of the RSVP task, arousal increased to a greater extent in the meditation groups than in the the relaxation group.

Relative to studying alone, guessing the meanings of unknown words can improve later recognition of their meanings, even if those guesses were incorrect – the pretesting effect (PTE). The error-correction hypothesis suggests that incorrect guesses produce error signals that promote memory for the meanings when they are revealed. The current research sought to test the error-correction explanation of the PTE. In three experiments, participants studied unfamiliar Finnish-English word pairs by either studying each complete pair or by guessing the English translation before its presentation. In the latter case, the participants also guessed which of two categories the word belonged to. Hence, guesses from the correct category were semantically closer to the true translation than guesses from the incorrect category. In Experiment 1, guessing increased subsequent recognition of the English translations, especially for translations that were presented on trials in which the participants’ guesses were from the correct category. Experiment 2 replicated these target recognition effects while also demonstrating that they do not extend to associative recognition performance. Experiment 3 again replicated the target recognition pattern, while also examining participants’ metacognitive recognition judgments. Participants correctly judged that their memory would be better after small than after large errors, but incorrectly believed that making any errors would be detrimental, relative to study-only. Overall, the data are inconsistent with the error-correction hypothesis; small, within-category errors produced better recognition than large, cross-category errors. Alternative theories, based on elaborative encoding and motivated learning, are considered.