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Under certain conditions, the retrieval of some information can increase the recall of other information, a phenomenon known as retrieval-induced facilitation. Chan (Journal of Memory and Language 61:153-170, 2009) proposed two moderating factors to account for why retrieval causes facilitation in some situations and forgetting in others: (1) integration at the time of encoding and (2) the delay between retrieval practice and final test. Chan found a 9-11% facilitation effect when the materials were well integrated and the final test occurred after a 24-h delay. Two sets of experiments sought to replicate and extend Chan's study by examining retrieval-induced facilitation not only following a 24-h delay but after longer delays (i.e., 1 or 2 weeks). A meta-analysis including these replications and the original experiments was also conducted. The results provide additional evidence of retrieval-induced facilitation, with no evidence that the effect varies as a function of the final delay. However, the size of the effect was found to be somewhat smaller than previously observed.

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.

Retrieval fluency can affect the metacognitive judgments people make about their memory. In a study by Benjamin, Bjork, and Schwartz (1998), participants predicted they would be better able to recall the answers to questions they retrieved more quickly than the answers to questions they retrieved more slowly, despite actual performance going in the opposite direction. In the present study, we examined the effects of retrieval fluency in the context of the Internet. Results from 3 studies suggest that participants misattribute the time it takes to find information online as being a predictor of the likelihood of actually being able to recall that information from memory. This finding shows how the metacognitive effects of retrieval fluency can extend beyond the context of one's own memory to encompass interactions with transactive memory partners like the Internet.

Fidget spinners have experienced a rapid rise in popularity, at least partially because they are marketed as attentional aides with the potential to enhance student learning. In the current study, college-aged students watched educational videos while either using a fidget spinner or not. Using a fidget spinner was associated with increased reports of attentional lapses, diminished judgments of learning, and impaired performance on a memory test for the material covered in the video. The adverse effect on learning was observed regardless of whether the use of fidget spinners was manipulated between-subjects (Experiment 1) or within-subjects (Experiment 2), and was observed even when the sample and analysis were limited to participants who came into the study with neutral or positive views on the use of fidget spinners. These results suggest that if fidget spinners are beneficial for learning, such benefits are relatively limited or at least do not extend to the conditions present in the current study.

The tendency to conform to prior examples can be viewed as a form of mental fixation that has negative consequences and limits the scope and quality of designs. Two experiments using the Smith, S. M., Ward, T. B., & Schumacher, J. S. [(1993) "Memory & Cognition," 21, 837-845] toy invention task were conducted to determine whether participants who viewed example toys would subsequently generate toys rated as less novel compared to a control group viewing no examples. Although participants who viewed examples tended to incorporate the example features into their own ideas, the novelty of their ideas was rated as higher than those of the control group. This effect occurred both with no specific instruction regarding the examples (Experiment 1), as well as when specifically instructed to be different from the examples (Experiment 2). These results indicate that examples do not always have a negative impact on creativity, and suggest they may sometimes help lead to more unusual ideas.

The gestures that occur alongside speech provide listeners with cues that both improve and alter memory for speech. The present research investigated the interplay of gesture and speech by examining the influence of retrieval on memory for gesture. In three experiments, participants watched video clips of an actor speaking a series of statements with or without gesture before being asked to retrieve the speech portions of half of those statements. Participants were then tested on their ability to recall whether the actor had gestured during each statement and, if so, to recall the nature of the gesture that was produced. Results indicated that attempting to retrieve the speech portion of the statements enhanced participants' ability to remember the gesture portion of the statements. This result was only observed, however, for representational gestures when the speech and gesture components were meaningfully related (Experiments 1 & 2). It was not observed for beat gestures or nonsense gestures (Experiments 2 & 3). These results are consistent with the idea that gestures can be coactivated during the retrieval of speech and that such coactivation is due to the integrated representation of speech and gesture in memory

Learners may be uncertain about whether encountered information is true. Uncertainty may encourage people to critically assess information's accuracy, serving as a kind of desirable difficulty that benefits learning. Uncertainty may also have negative effects, however, leading people to mistrust true information or to later misremember false information as true. In three experiments, participants read history statements. In one condition, all statements were true, and the participants knew it. In the other two conditions, some statements were true, and others were false. Participants were either told the statements' accuracy or they guessed the statements' accuracy prior to feedback, a manipulation we refer to as truth-checking. All participants were then tested on recalling the true information and on recognising true versus false statements. We observed a significant benefit of truth-checking in one of the three experiments, suggesting that truth-checking may have some potential to enhance learning, perhaps by inducing people to encode to-be-learned information more deeply than they would otherwise. Even so, the benefit may come at a cost—truth-checking took significantly longer than study alone, and it led to a greater likelihood of thinking false information was true, suggesting costs of truth-checking may tend to outweigh benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Schacter's (2001) work on "The Seven Sins of Memory" conceptualized and communicated many of the failures of memory and their critical role in cognition. At the heart of the framework is the idea that memory often fails not because it is dysfunctional or maladaptive, but because it prioritizes flexibility and the ability to think and behave adaptively over the ability to retain and remember veraciously. This article adapts the 7 sins framework to a new domain--that of creative cognition. Each of the 7 sins are discussed in relation to how they might play a role in allowing people to generate new ideas, solve problems, and overcome the various barriers that hinder creative thought. Expanding upon the creative cognition approach, it is argued that memory and creativity are intrinsically interconnected and that one's ability to think and behave creatively relies in part on the ability to forget and misremember.

Use of highlighting is a prevalent study strategy among students, but evidence regarding its benefit for learning is mixed. We examined highlighting in relation to distributed study and students' attitudes about highlighting as a study strategy. Participants read a text passage twice while highlighting or not, with their readings either distributed or massed, and followed by a week-delayed test. An overall benefit of highlighting occurred, with highlighting being especially beneficial with massed readings of the passages. Importantly, highlighting did not impair knowledge of non-highlighted information. Interestingly, those students reporting that they did not think highlighting was beneficial or were unsure about its benefits actually benefitted more from highlighting than did students who were pro-highlighting. Overall, our results indicate that under some conditions, highlighting can be a beneficial study strategy for learning and argue for students being trained in how to optimize the potential benefits of their highlighting behavior.

Four experiments examined the interplay of memory and creative cognition, showing that attempting to think of new uses for an object can cause the forgetting of old uses. Specifically, using an adapted version of the Alternative Uses Task (Guilford, 1957), participants studied several uses for a variety of common household objects before attempting to generate new uses for half of those objects. As revealed by performance on a final cued-recall task, attempting to generate new uses caused participants to forget the studied uses. This thinking-induced forgetting effect was observed regardless of whether participants attempted to generate unusual uses or common uses, but failed to emerge when participants used the studied uses as hints to guide their generation of new uses. Additionally, the forgetting effect correlated with individual differences in creativity such that participants who exhibited more forgetting generated more creative uses than participants who exhibited less forgetting. These findings indicate that thinking can cause forgetting and that such forgetting may contribute to the ability to think creatively.

Tests, as learning events, are often more effective than are additional study opportunities, especially when recall is tested after a long retention interval. To what degree, though, do prior test or study events support subsequent study activities? We set out to test an implication of Bjork and Bjork's (1992) new theory of disuse--that, under some circumstances, prior study may facilitate subsequent study more than does prior testing. Participants learned English-Swahili translations and then underwent a practice phase during which some items were tested (without feedback) and other items were restudied. Although tested items were better recalled after a 1-week delay than were restudied items, this benefit did not persist after participants had the opportunity to study the items again via feedback. In fact, after this additional study opportunity, items that had been restudied earlier were better recalled than were items that had been tested earlier. These results suggest that measuring the memorial consequences of testing requires more than a single test of retention and, theoretically, a consideration of the differing status of initially recallable and nonrecallable items.

Students often take photos of slides during lectures. Research on the photo-taking-impairment effect suggests that this behavior could impair memory for lecture content, whereas other work suggests that photo-taking could cause memory benefits, at least for visually presented information. Two experiments examined the effect of photographing lecture slides on memory for information that appeared on the lecture slides as well as information only spoken aloud by the lecturer. In Experiment 1, participants were assigned to take photos of some lecture slides, but not others, before being tested on memory for the material. Experiment 2 employed a yoked design in which half of the participants took photos of slides volitionally, whereas the other half were assigned to photograph the same slides nonvolitionally. Across both experiments, a photo-taking benefit was observed for on-slide information, regardless of volition condition. These findings contrasted with participants' metacognitive judgments of when taking a photo would benefit their memory. General Audience Summary: Students often take photos of slides during lectures. Unfortunately, research on the photo-taking-impairment effect suggests that taking photos of lecture slides could impair memory for lecture content. In two experiments, we examined the effect of taking pictures of lecture slides on memory for information in the lecture by comparing memory test performance for information presented while participants took photos with information presented while they did not take photos. Information was divided into material presented on the lecture slides as well as material that was only spoken aloud by the lecturer. In Experiment 1, participants were assigned to take photos of some lecture slides but not others, before being tested on memory for the material. In Experiment 2, some participants were allowed to choose which slides to photograph, whereas other participants were instructed to take photos of those same slides and did not get to choose which slides to photograph. Across both experiments, a photo-taking benefit was observed for information presented on the slide regardless of volition condition, indicating that taking photos can help memory for lecture content written on slides. The effect of photo-taking on memory for information that was only spoken aloud was mixed, with Experiment 1 showing no benefit, but Experiment 2 revealing a benefit. Further work is needed to disambiguate these findings. Interestingly, our memory findings contrast with participants' thoughts about how photo-taking would affect their memory—they thought that taking a photo would help them remember on-slide information, but not taking a photo would help them remember only-said information. Instead, taking photos benefitted memory for both types of information. Overall, these results indicate that students do not seem to put themselves at risk for memory impairments by taking photos of lecture slides. On the contrary, photo-taking could benefit memory for photographed content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thinking and remembering can cause forgetting. In the context of remembering, retrieving one item can cause the forgetting of other items (Anderson, Bjork, & Bjork, 1994). A similar phenomenon has been observed in the context of creative problem solving--attempting to generate a target associate in the Remote Associates Test (RAT) can cause the forgetting of inappropriate associates (Storm, Angello, & Bjork, 2011). Experiment 1 examined whether this problem-solving-induced forgetting is cue dependent or cue independent by manipulating the cues used at final test. Whereas some participants were tested on the inappropriate associates using the same cues that were used during problem solving, other participants were tested using new, or independent, cues. Problem-solving-induced forgetting was observed in the same-cue condition, but not in the new-cue condition. Experiment 2 replicated the overall absence of problem-solving-induced forgetting in the new-cue condition and found that individual differences in cue-independent forgetting did not predict problem-solving performance on a separate set of RAT problems.

Research on how individuals monitor their level of comprehension during study paints a picture of learners as being insensitive to many of the factors or conditions of learning that can enhance long-term retention and transfer. In previous research, however, deWinstanley and Bjork (2004) demonstrated that learners--if made sensitive to the memorial benefits of generation in the context of an informative test following study of a text passage in which they had encoded both to-be-read and to-be-generated critical items--then became more effective processors of future to-be-read information presented in a 2nd text passage. In Experiments 1 and 2 of the present research, we explored the potential applicability of this effect by testing whether it could survive certain types of activity-filled delays. In Experiments 3 and 4, we tested whether enhanced processing of contextual information, an encoding strategy that could possibly have been discovered by participants during the testing episode for the 1st text passage, was a potential underlying cause of this effect. Together, our results bring to light an additional benefit of test taking and point to what might be considered necessary and sufficient conditions for leading learners to become more effective processors of future to-be-learned information. (Contains 2 tables.)

Research on retrieval-induced forgetting has shown that retrieval can cause the forgetting of related or competing items in memory (Anderson, Bjork, & Bjork, 1994). In the present research, we examined whether an analogous phenomenon occurs in the context of creative problem solving. Using the Remote Associates Test (RAT; Mednick, 1962), we found that attempting to generate a novel common associate to 3 cue words caused the forgetting of other strong associates related to those cue words. This problem-solving-induced forgetting effect occurred even when participants failed to generate a viable solution, increased in magnitude when participants spent additional time problem solving, and was positively correlated with problem-solving success on a separate set of RAT problems. These results implicate a role for forgetting in overcoming fixation in creative problem solving. (Contains 1 table and 2 figures.)

Research on retrieval-induced forgetting has demonstrated that retrieving some information from memory can cause the forgetting of other information in memory. Here, the authors report research on the relearning of items that have been subjected to retrieval-induced forgetting. Participants studied a list of category-exemplar pairs, underwent a series of retrieval-practice and relearning trials, and, finally, were tested on the initially studied pairs. The final recall of non-relearned items exhibited a cumulative effect of retrieval-induced forgetting such that the size of the effect increased with each block of retrieval practice. Of most interest, and very surprising from a common-sense standpoint, items that were relearned benefited more from that relearning if they had previously been forgotten. The results offer insights into the nature and durability of retrieval-induced forgetting and provide additional evidence that forgetting is an enabler--rather than a disabler--of future learning.