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We assessed the effects of removing some constraints that characterise traditional experiments on the effects of spaced, rather than massed, study opportunities. In five experiments—using lists of to-be-remembered words—we examined the effects of how total study time was distributed across multiple repetitions of a given to-be-remembered word. Overall, within a given list, recall profited from study time being distributed (e.g., four 1-s presentations or two 2-s presentations vs one 4-s presentation). Among the implications of these findings is that if students choose to engage in massed studying (by virtue of constraints on their study time or a failure to appreciate the benefits of spaced study sessions), then studying the information twice but for half the time may produce memory benefits in a single study session.

Abstract. In participants’ learning of semantically related paired associates, such as whale-mammal, prior research has demonstrated that having participants first attempt to predict what the to-be-learned response to a given cue will be enhances subsequent cued recall of that response, even when such predictions are always wrong (e.g., Kornell et al., 2009 ). In six experiments, we evaluate the importance of such error-prone predictions having a semantic basis – versus an acoustic (rhyming) basis. Our results show that both semantic generation as well as semantically related materials seem necessary if errorful generation is to have positive effects; generation based on other rules and materials does not aid learning. Learners are not, however, metacognitively aware of such benefits of generating errors.

A century ago, spelling skills were highly valued and widely taught in schools using traditional methods, such as weekly lists, drill exercises, and low- and high-stakes spelling tests. That approach was featured in best-selling textbooks such as the Horn-Ashbaugh Speller of 1920. In the early 21st century, however, skepticism as to the importance of spelling has grown, some schools have deemphasized or abandoned spelling instruction altogether, and there has been a proliferation of non-traditional approaches to teaching spelling. These trends invite a reevaluation of the role of spelling in modern English-speaking societies and whether the subject should be explicitly taught (and if so, what are research-supported methods for doing so). In this article, we examine the literature to address whether spelling skills are still important enough to be taught, summarize relevant evidence, and argue that a comparison of common approaches to spelling instruction in the early 20th century versus more recent approaches provides some valuable insights. We also discuss the value of explicit spelling instruction and highlight potentially effective ways to implement such instruction, including the use of spelling tests. Overall, our goals are to better characterize the role of spelling skills in today’s society and to identify several pedagogical approaches—some derived from traditional methods and others that are more recent—that hold promise for developing such skills in efficient and effective ways.

Students are often advised to do all of their studying in one good place, but restudying to-be-learned material in a new context can enhance subsequent recall. We examined whether there are similar benefits for testing. In Experiment 1 ( n = 106), participants studied a 36-word list and 48 hr later—when back in the same or a new context—either restudied or recalled the list without feedback. After another 48 hr, all participants free-recalled the list in a new context. Experiment 2 ( n = 203) differed by having the testing-condition participants restudy the list before being tested. Across both experiments, testing in a new context reduced recall, which carried over to the final test, whereas restudying in a new context did not impair (and in Experiment 2, significantly enhanced) recall. These findings reveal critical interactions between contextual-variation and retrieval-practice effects, which we interpret as consistent with a distribution-of-memory-strengths framework.

Written in 1928, the year W. H. Auden graduated from the University of Oxford at age 21 and considered an example of his juvenilia, “Control of the Passes” or “The Secret Agent” as it was eventuall...

Technological advances have given us tools—Google, in particular—that can both augment and free up our cognitive resources. Research has demonstrated, however, that some cognitive costs may arise from our reliance on such external memories. We examined whether pretesting—asking participants to solve a problem before consulting Google for needed information—can enhance participants’ subsequent recall for the searched-for content as well as for relevant information previously studied. Two groups of participants, one with no programming knowledge and one with some programming knowledge, learned several fundamental programming concepts in the context of a problem-solving task. On a later multiple-choice test with transfer questions, participants who attempted the task before consulting Google for help out-performed participants who were allowed to search Google right away. The benefit of attempting to solve the problem before googling appeared larger with some degree of programming experience, consistent with the notion that some prior knowledge can help learners integrate new information in ways that benefit its learning as well as that of previously studied related information.

Although widely used, the true-false test is often regarded as a superficial or even harmful test, one that lacks the pedagogical efficacy of more substantive tests (e.g., cued-recall or short-answer tests). Such charges, however, lack conclusive evidence and may, in some cases, be false. Across four experiments, we investigated how true-false testing of studied passages (e.g., on Yellowstone National Park) might enhance—or be optimized to enhance—performance on subsequent cued-recall tests. In Experiments 1–2, relative to control performance that did not benefit from any additional exposure, we found that (a) the evaluation of true statements enhanced the recall of tested (but not related) content and that (b) the evaluation of false statements enhanced the recall of related (but not tested) content, a differential pattern of benefits that did not depend on the syntactic structure of the test items. Moreover, when competitive clauses were embedded within the true-false items of Experiment 3 (e.g., True or false? Castle Geyser (not Steamboat Geyser) is the tallest geyser), we found that the evaluation of both types of statements enhanced the recall of both types of content. Finally, in Experiment 4, these holistic benefits proved robust to a retention interval of 48 h and were comparable with the benefits of a restudy condition in which learners restudied all of the propositions that could have been retrieved in the evaluation of the true-false items. Accordingly, although it was not uncommon for participants to misremember information as a consequence of true-false practice, our findings broadly indicate that, especially when carefully constructed, true-false tests can elicit beneficial, not superficial, processes that belie their poor reputation.

Two original essays and 16 published since 1950 offer a comprehensive view of Cynewulf, his language, and his poetry. The collection contains important new statements on dates, provenance, and canon by R.D. Fulk and Patrick W. Conner, four influential essays that thoroughly explore Cynewulf's runic signature and poetic style, and major contributions to our understanding of the four signed poems of Cynewulf, Fates of the Apostles, Christ II, Juliana, and Elene. Three essays are devoted to each of these poems, and the essays themselves exemplify a broad range of approaches to this highly elusive Anglo-Saxon poet. The volume complements existing book-length treatments of the subject and will be welcome to scholars and students who need the foundations of Cynewulf scholarship at their fingertips.

One of the “important peculiarities” of human learning (Bjork RA and Bjork EL. From Learning Processes to Cognitive Processes: Essays in Honor of William K. Estes, 1992, p. 35–67) is that certain conditions that produce forgetting—that is, impair access to some to-be-learned information studied earlier—also enhance the learning of that information when it is restudied. Such conditions include changing the environmental context from when some to-be-learned material is studied to when that material is restudied; increasing the delay from when something is studied to when it is tested or restudied; and interleaving, rather than blocking, the study or practice of the components of to-be-learned knowledge or skills. In this paper, we provide some conjectures as to why conditions that produce forgetting can also enable learning, and why a misunderstanding of this peculiarity of how humans learn can result in nonoptimal teaching and self-regulated learning.

Real-world learning contexts sometimes require the use of general knowledge, whereas others depend on recalling detailed information about individual events. By combining category learning with trial-unique source information, we examined how different learning sequences (blocked vs. interleaved) impact the acquisition of generalized (category-level) and detailed (exemplar-specific) knowledge. Participants were trained to identify paintings by different artists, half of which were studied in a sequence blocked by artist and the remainder interleaved between artists. Participants were tested on general knowledge (category induction) and detailed memory (source recall), both immediately after learning and a 1-week delay. We found that interleaved learning improved general knowledge, but blocked learning improved detailed memory. Furthermore, we found that general knowledge remained stable whereas detailed memory performance declined after a delay. Our results indicate that optimal training conditions differ based on the goals of learning such as enhancing general knowledge or improving memory of individual event details.

A century ago, spelling skills were highly valued and widely taught in schools using traditional methods, such as weekly lists, drill exercises, and low- and high-stakes spelling tests. That approach was featured in best-selling textbooks such as the Horn-Ashbaugh Speller of 1920. In the early 21st century, however, skepticism as to the importance of spelling has grown, some schools have deemphasized or abandoned spelling instruction altogether, and there has been a proliferation of non-traditional approaches to teaching spelling. These trends invite a reevaluation of the role of spelling in modern English-speaking societies and whether the subject should be explicitly taught (and if so, what are research-supported methods for doing so). In this article we examine the literature to address whether spelling skills are still important enough to be taught, summarize relevant evidence, and argue that a comparison of common approaches to spelling instruction in the early 20th century versus more recent approaches provides some valuable insights. We also discuss the value of explicit spelling instruction and highlight potentially effective ways to implement such instruction, including the use of spelling tests. Overall, our goals are to better characterize the role of spelling skills in today’s society and to identify several pedagogical approaches—some derived from traditional methods and others that are more recent—that hold promise for developing such skills in efficient and effective ways.

Although examples can be structured to emphasize diagnostic features of concepts, novice learners tend to focus on irrelevant surface features and struggle to encode deeper structures. Experiment 1 examined whether pretesting-answering questions about content before it is studied-could enhance learners' noticing of diagnostic features, making them easier to process during subsequent study. Participants studied statistical concepts with examples that emphasized surface details or deep structure, and then classified new examples of these concepts. Studying examples that emphasized deep structure increased classification performance compared to examples that emphasized surface details. Moreover, taking pretests prior to studying the examples increased classification performance and eliminated differential benefits of studying structure versus surface examples. Experiment 2 examined whether pretesting serves a role beyond directing attention. After studying different statistical concepts with only surface-emphasizing examples, classification performance was better when participants actually took pretests compared to being given the correct responses. It is the generative aspect of pretesting, beyond attention directing, that improves conceptual learning among novice learners. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Interleaving examples of different categories, rather than blocking examples by category, often enhances the learning of those categories, but does this benefit vary by learner? On one hand, it could be argued that interleaving places increased demands on a learner's working-memory capacity (WMC), which could foster suboptimal learning for those with lower WMC than for those with higher WMC. On the other hand, studies show that learners with higher WMC seem to process information in more effective ways, in which case lower-WMC learners may benefit more from interleaving than higher-WMC learners. To test these two hypotheses, across five studies, participants studied examples of perceptual categories (artists’ styles) or text-based categories (non-parametric statistics) presented either blocked or interleaved. On a final test, participants classified new examples of the studied categories. We found a robust benefit of interleaving across both domains, but this benefit did not vary by WMC.

The Wife of Bath's famous erudition, resistance to authority, and unapologetic sexuality all come together in one of Chaucer's epithets for her private parts. Bele chose (beautiful thing) occurs only three times: in Chaucer's prologue to the Wife of Bath's Tale, in a Middle English translation of a Latin medical text, and—the present paper argues—in the Roman de la Rose. Chaucer uses the term as a deliberate repudiation of pudendum (shameful thing), a term that he does not use but which was undoubtedly known to him through several classical and medieval sources. A survey of all Chaucer's euphemisms for private parts in the Wife of Bath's Prologue contextualizes the discussion.

This is a review of the Database of Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (ISTC): The International Database of 15th-century European Printing

The sequencing of exemplars during study can have a large effect on category or concept induction. Counter to learners' intuitions, interleaving exemplars from different categories is often more effective for learning the different underlying categories than is blocking all the exemplars by category (e.g., Kornell & Bjork, 2008). Prior research suggests that blocking and interleaving each support different aspects of induction: Interleaving appears to enhance between-category discrimination, whereas blocking appears to promote the learning of within-category commonalities. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants studied paintings by 12 artists and were asked to induce the different artists' painting styles. We explored whether hybrid schedules can leverage the benefits of both types of schedules, comparing blocked, interleaved, and 3 hybrid schedules-blocked-to-interleaved, interleaved-to-blocked, and miniblocks. The miniblocks and blocked-to-interleaved schedules were as effective, statistically, but not better than pure interleaving. The blocked schedule led to the worst performance. In Experiments 3 and 4, we explored participants' a priori beliefs by having them self-schedule hypothetical future category-learning tasks. Although participants demonstrated some metacognitive sophistication with respect to the relative benefits of blocked and interleaved study, pure interleaving was the least popular schedule, despite its being one of the most, effective schedules for learning. (PsycINFO Database Record

During the logocentric Middle Ages, etymology and wordplay helped exegetes, philosophers, theologians, and poets understand the world and the world’s relationship to the divine. The case studies presented in this useful and fascinating collection of essays demonstrate how.

Prior work (e.g., Koriat, 1997) has shown that when learners predict how well they will remember an item being studied (metacognitive monitoring), they account for certain factors that predict later memory, but ignore other relevant factors. In the present study, we examined how level of processing and assigned value affect metacognitive judgments. When the cue of a cue-target pair promoted the use of deeper processing at encoding, people predicted better cued-recall than they did for items associated with cues that related to the target on a more shallow level. However, when different levels of processing (LOP) were induced via questions at encoding, people predicted little to no benefit for deep levels of processing on a later free recall test. Thus, it appears that the degree to which the LOP condition is integrated with the to-be-studied item affects the degree to which LOP is incorporated into metacognitive predictions. In contrast to how level of processing affects JOLs, we find that items that are arbitrarily defined as being more valuable are given higher JOLs, even under conditions in which value does not reliably affect recall, and even when more diagnostic cues (e.g., LOP) are available. Thus, the present work refines our knowledge of the types of cues that people do or do not account for when making metacognitive monitoring judgments such as judgments of learning (JOLs).

Retrieving information can impair the subsequent recall of related information. Such retrieval-induced forgetting is often attributed to inhibitory mechanisms, but Jonker, MacLeod, and Seli (2013) recently proposed an alternative account. In their view, the study and retrieval-practice phases constitute two disparate contexts, and impairment of unpractised members from practised categories is attributable to their being absent from the retrieval-practice context, which is where, according to Jonker et al., participants preferentially search at the time of final test. In evidence of this account, Jonker et al. showed that even restudy practice—which is assumed by the inhibitory account to be insufficient to cause forgetting (i.e., retrieval-specificity)—can cause forgetting when a mental context change is inserted between study and restudy. The present research sought to replicate this finding while also testing the possibility that a far mental context change would cause more forgetting than a near mental context change. In Experiment 1, participants described a vacation inside the United States (near) or outside the United States (far). In Experiments 2 and 3, participants described the layout of their own home (near) or their parents’ home (far). In contrast to the predictions of the context account, however, but consistent with the predictions of the inhibitory account, none of the restudy-plus-context-change conditions resulted in significant forgetting.

People often think of themselves and their experiences in a more positive light than is objectively justified. Inhibitory control processes may promote this positivity bias by modulating the accessibility of negative thoughts and episodes from the past, which then limits their influence in the construction of imagined future events. We tested this hypothesis by investigating the correlation between retrieval-induced forgetting and the extent to which individuals imagine positive and negative episodic future events. First, we measured performance on a task requiring participants to imagine personal episodic events (either positive or negative), and then we correlated that measure with retrieval-induced forgetting. As predicted, individuals who exhibited higher levels of retrieval-induced forgetting imagined fewer negative episodic future events than did individuals who exhibited lower levels of retrieval-induced forgetting. This finding provides new insight into the possible role of retrieval-induced forgetting in autobiographical memory.

Interleaving exemplars of to-be-learned categories-rather than blocking exemplars by category-typically enhances inductive learning. Learners, however, tend to believe the opposite, even after their own performance has benefited from interleaving. In Experiments 1 and 2, the authors examined the influence of 2 factors that they hypothesized contribute to the illusion that blocking enhances inductive learning: Namely, that (a) blocking creates a sense of fluent extraction during study of the features defining a given category, and (b) learners come to the experimental task with a pre-existing belief that blocking instruction by topic is superior to intermixing topics. In Experiments 3-5, the authors attempted to uproot learners' belief in the superiority of blocking through experience-based and theory-based debiasing techniques by (a) providing detailed theory-based information as to why blocking seems better, but is not, and (b) explicitly drawing attention to the link between study schedule and subsequent performance, both of which had only modest effects. Only when they disambiguated test performance on the 2 schedules by separating them (Experiment 6) did the combination of experience- and theory-based debiasing lead a majority of learners to appreciate interleaving. Overall, the results indicate that 3 influences combine to make altering learners' misconceptions difficult: the sense of fluency that can accompany nonoptimal modes of instruction; pre-existing beliefs learners bring to new tasks; and the willingness, even eagerness, to believe that 1 is unique as a learner-that what enhances others' learning differs from what enhances one's own learning. (PsycINFO Database Record

PurposeThe Scripps Idiopathic Diseases of Man (IDIOM) study aims to discover novel gene-disease relationships and provide molecular genetic diagnosis and treatment guidance for individuals with novel diseases using genome sequencing integrated with clinical assessment and multidisciplinary case review. Here we describe the operational protocol and initial results of the IDIOM study.MethodsA total of 121 cases underwent first-tier review by the principal investigators to determine whether the primary inclusion criteria were satisfied, 59 (48.8%) underwent second-tier review by our clinician-scientist review panel, and 17 patients (14.0%) and their family members were enrolled.Results60% of cases resulted in a plausible molecular diagnosis, and 18% of cases resulted in a confirmed molecular diagnosis. Two of three confirmed cases led to the identification of novel gene-disease relationships. In the third confirmed case a previously described but unrecognized disease was revealed. In all three confirmed cases a new clinical management strategy was initiated based on the genetic findings.ConclusionGenome sequencing provides tangible clinical benefit for individuals with idiopathic genetic disease, not only in the context of molecular genetic diagnosis of known rare conditions but also in cases where prior clinical information regarding a new genetic disorder is lacking.

Richard Schmidt and I titled our article “New Conceptualizations of Practice: Common Principles in Three Paradigms Suggest New Concepts for Training” to reflect our view that prevailing ideas about how to optimize teaching, learning, and practicing were, in our words, “at best incomplete, and at worst incorrect.” We argued that teachers and trainers were susceptible to being misled by two commonsense assumptions—namely, that procedures that enhance performance during training are the procedures of choice and that the context of training needs to match in detail the posttraining context that is the target of training. A variety of then-recent experimental findings challenged both assumptions and demonstrated, in particular, that procedures posing certain difficulties and appearing to slow the rate of learning often enhanced long-term retention and transfer of to-be-learned skills and knowledge. Given the parallel nature of such findings for both motor and verbal learning, we concluded that principles of considerable generality could be deduced to upgrade teaching and training.

Objective Numerous studies have demonstrated increased load of de novo copy number variants or single nucleotide variants in individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders, including epileptic encephalopathies, intellectual disability, and autism. Methods We searched for de novo mutations in a family quartet with a sporadic case of epileptic encephalopathy with no known etiology to determine the underlying cause using high-coverage whole exome sequencing (WES) and lower-coverage whole genome sequencing. Mutations in additional patients were identified by WES. The effect of mutations on protein function was assessed in a heterologous expression system. Results We identified a de novo missense mutation in KCNB1 that encodes the KV2.1 voltage-gated potassium channel. Functional studies demonstrated a deleterious effect of the mutation on KV2.1 function leading to a loss of ion selectivity and gain of a depolarizing inward cation conductance. Subsequently, we identified 2 additional patients with epileptic encephalopathy and de novo KCNB1 missense mutations that cause a similar pattern of KV2.1 dysfunction. Interpretation Our genetic and functional evidence demonstrate that KCNB1 mutation can result in early onset epileptic encephalopathy. This expands the locus heterogeneity associated with epileptic encephalopathies and suggests that clinical WES may be useful for diagnosis of epileptic encephalopathies of unknown etiology. Ann Neurol 2014;76:529–540

Prior research by Kornell and Bjork (2007) and Hartwig and Dunlosky (2012) has demonstrated that college students tend to employ study strategies that are far from optimal. We examined whether individuals in the broader—and typically older—population might hold different beliefs about how best to study and learn, given their more extensive experience outside of formal coursework and deadlines. Via a web-based survey, however, we found striking similarities: Learners’ study decisions tend to be driven by deadlines, and the benefits of activities such as self-testing and reviewing studied materials are mostly unappreciated. We also found evidence, however, that one's mindset with respect to intelligence is related to one's habits and beliefs: Individuals who believe that intelligence can be increased through effort were more likely to value the pedagogical benefits of self-testing, to restudy, and to be intrinsically motivated to learn, compared to individuals who believe that intelligence is fixed.

The finding that trying, and failing, to predict the upcoming to-be-remembered response to a given cue can enhance later recall of that response, relative to studying the intact cue-response pair, is surprising, especially given that the standard paradigm (e.g., Kornell, Hays, & Bjork, 2009) involves allocating what would otherwise be study time to generating an error. In three experiments, we sought to eliminate two potential heuristics that participants might use to aid recall of correct responses on the final test and to explore the effects of interference both at an immediate and at a delayed test. In Experiment 1, by intermixing strongly associated to-be-remembered pairs with weakly associated pairs, we eliminated a potential heuristic participants can use on the final test in the standard version of the paradigm-namely, that really strong associates are incorrect responses. In Experiment 2, by rigging half of the participants' responses to be correct, we eliminated another potential heuristic-namely, that one's initial guesses are virtually always wrong. In Experiment 3, we examined whether participants' ability to remember-and discriminate between-their incorrect guesses and correct responses would be lost after a 48-h delay, when source memory should be reduced. Across all experiments, we continued to find a robust benefit of trying to guess to-be-learned responses, even when incorrect, versus studying intact cue-response pairs. The benefits of making incorrect guesses are not an artifact of the paradigm, nor are they limited to short retention intervals.

The induction of categories and concepts from examples—which plays an important role in how people come to organize and understand the world—can happen at multiple levels, but how do competing values at these different levels affect learning? Using perceptually rich images of snakes, we asked participants to attend to either the snakes’ specific genus or a broader categorization and then tested induction at both levels. We also varied the intrinsic value of the broader categorization (high value: whether the snake was venomous; low value: whether it was tropical). We found an interaction between study instruction and intrinsic value: Participants in the low-value condition were better able to induce the level they were instructed to attend to (i.e., genus or broader category) than to induce the level they were not instructed to attend to, whereas participants in the high-value condition, regardless of the level of categorization they were instructed to attend to, were significantly better at learning the broad categorization (for them, whether the snake was venomous) than were participants in the low-value condition. Our results suggest that intrinsically valuable features can disrupt the intentional learning of other, task-relevant information, but enhance the incidental learning of the same information.

We examined how testing potentiates self-regulated learning and alleviates the foresight bias—an illusion of competence that arises from information being present during study but absent at test—and whether such benefits can transfer to non-tested material. After studying paired associates that varied in difficulty, participants either restudied or were tested on all the pairs (Experiment 1); were tested on only half of the pairs (Experiment 2); or were tested on half of the pairs and restudied the remaining pairs (Experiments 3 and 4). All items were then restudied at participants’ own pace before a final cued-recall test. In Experiment 1, interim tests enhanced the effectiveness of subsequent study time and alleviated the foresight bias, whereas interim restudying had no such benefits. Experiments 2, 3, and 4 demonstrated that such test-potentiated self-regulated learning can transfer to non-tested items if restudied intermixed with items that were tested. The results demonstrate yet another practical benefit of testing and suggest that retrieval practice can foster metacognitive sophistication among learners, serving as an experiencebased debiasing procedure.

Previous research on the redundancy principle in multimedia learning has shown that although exact correspondence between on-screen text and narration generally impairs learning, brief labels within an animation can improve learning. To clarify and extend the theoretical and practical implications of these results, the authors of the present research examined the extent to which varying degrees of correspondence between on-screen text and narration in a multimedia lesson affects recall and transfer. In 2 experiments, college students viewed an animated and narrated PowerPoint lesson about the life cycle of a star, with different participants experiencing different degrees of correspondence between on-screen text and narration. Consistent with the redundancy principle and the dual-channel theory of multimedia learning, both experiments demonstrated impairment for on-screen text identical to the narration. As an extension of previous research on the redundancy principle, however, both experiments also demonstrated an advantage for a small amount of discrepancy between narration and on-screen text. On the other hand, too much discrepancy resulted in learning just as poor as when the on-screen text was identical to the narration. Metacognitive judgments revealed that participants tended to prefer on-screen text identical to the narration, even though recall and transfer scores showed that on-screen text worded slightly differently than the narration was better for learning. Results indicate that despite learner preferences to the contrary, slight discrepancies between on-screen text and narration can be a desirable difficulty, suggesting an extension to the redundancy principle that is consistent with the desirable difficulties framework as well as the cognitive theory of multimedia learning.

Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is characterized by cognitive biases toward threat-relevant information, but the underlying mechanisms are unclear. We translated a retrieval-practice paradigm from cognitive science to investigate impaired inhibition of threat information as one such mechanism. Participants diagnosed with GAD and never-disordered control participants learned a series of cue–target pairs; whereas some cues were associated only with neutral targets, others were associated with both neutral and threat targets. Next, participants practiced retrieving neutral targets, which typically suppresses the subsequent recall of unpracticed associated targets (retrieval-induced forgetting; RIF). Finally, participants were tested on their recall of all targets. Despite showing intact RIF of neutral targets, the GAD group failed to exhibit RIF of threat targets. Furthermore, within the GAD group, less RIF of threat targets correlated with greater pervasiveness of worry. Deficits in inhibitory control over threat-relevant information may underlie the cognitive pathology of GAD, which has important treatment implications.

Teachers and trainers often try to prevent learners from making errors, but recent findings (e.g., Kornell, Hays, & Bjork, 2009) have demonstrated that tests can potentiate subsequent learning even when the correct answer is difficult or impossible to generate (e.g., "What is Nate Kornell's middle name?"). In 3 experiments, we explored when and why a failed test enhances learning. We found that failed tests followed by immediate feedback produced greater retention than did a presentation-only condition. Failed tests followed by delayed feedback, by contrast, did not produce such a benefit-except when the direction of the final test was reversed (i.e., the participants were provided with the target and had to produce the original cue). Our findings suggest that generating an incorrect response to a cue both activates the semantic network associated with the cue and suppresses the correct response. These processes appear to have 2 consequences: If feedback is presented immediately, the semantic activation enhances the mapping of the cue to the correct response; if feedback is presented at a delay, the prior suppression boosts the learning of the suppressed response.

The shift from recency to primacy with delay reflects a fundamental observation in the study of memory. As time passes, the accessibility of earlier-learned representations tends to increase relative to the accessibility of later-learned representations. In three experiments involving participants’ memory for text materials, we examined whether participants understood that there might be such a shift with retention interval. In marked contrast to their actual performance, participants predicted recency effects at both shorter and longer retention intervals. Our findings add to the evidence that the storage and retrieval dynamics of the human memory system, though adaptive overall from a statistics-of-use standpoint, are both complex and poorly understood by users of the system.

Recent studies demonstrate that interleaving the exemplars of different categories, rather than blocking exemplars by category, can enhance inductive learning—the ability to categorize new exemplars—presumably because interleaving affords discriminative contrasts between exemplars from different categories. Consistent with this view, other studies have demonstrated that decreasing between-category similarity and increasing within-category variability can eliminate or even reverse the interleaving benefit. We tested another hypothesis, one based on the dual-learning systems framework—namely, that the optimal schedule for learning categories should depend on an interaction of the cognitive system that mediates learning and the structure of the particular category being learned. Blocking should enhance rule-based category learning, which is mediated by explicit, hypothesis-testing processes, whereas interleaving should enhance information-integration category learning, which is mediated by an implicit, procedural-based learning system. Consistent with this view, we found a crossover interaction between schedule (blocked vs. interleaved) and category structure (rule-based vs. information-integration).

Among the criticisms of multiple-choice tests is that—by exposing the correct answer as one of the alternatives—such tests engage recognition processes rather than the productive retrieval processes known to enhance later recall. We tested whether multiple-choice tests could trigger productive retrieval processes—provided the alternatives were made plausible enough to enable test takers to retrieve both why the correct alternatives were correct and why the incorrect alternatives were incorrect. In two experiments, we found not only that properly constructed multiple-choice tests can indeed trigger productive retrieval processes, but also that they had one potentially important advantage over cued-recall tests. Both testing formats fostered retention of previously tested information, but multiple-choice tests also facilitated recall of information pertaining to incorrect alternatives, whereas cued-recall tests did not. Thus, multiple-choice tests can be constructed so that they exercise the very retrieval processes they have been accused of bypassing.

There are many instances in which perceptual disfluency leads to improved memory performance, a phenomenon often referred to as the perceptual-interference effect (e.g., Diemand-Yauman, Oppenheimer, & Vaughn (Cognition 118:111–115, 2010); Nairne (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 14:248–255, 1988)). In some situations, however, perceptual disfluency does not affect memory (Rhodes & Castel (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 137:615–625, 2008)), or even impairs memory (Glass, (Psychology and Aging 22:233–238, 2007)). Because of the uncertain effects of perceptual disfluency, it is important to establish when disfluency is a “desirable difficulty” (Bjork, 1994) and when it is not, and the degree to which people’s judgments of learning (JOLs) reflect the consequences of processing disfluent information. In five experiments, our participants saw multiple lists of blurred and clear words and gave JOLs after each word. The JOLs were consistently higher for the perceptually fluent items in within-subjects designs, which accurately predicted the pattern of recall performance when the presentation time was short (Exps. 1a and 2a). When the final test was recognition or when the presentation time was long, however, we found no difference in recall for clear and blurred words, although JOLs continued to be higher for clear words (Exps. 2b and 3). When fluency was manipulated between subjects, neither JOLs nor recall varied between formats (Exp. 1b). This study suggests a boundary condition for the desirable difficulty of perceptual disfluency and indicates that a visual distortion, such as blurring a word, may not always induce the deeper processing necessary to create a perceptual-interference effect.