Investigating Memory Reactivity with a Within-Participant Manipulation of Judgments of Learning

Why does making JOLs influence subsequent memory, and when learners make judgments of learning (JOLs) for some items but not others, how is recall performance affected? To answer these questions, participants studied related and unrelated word pairs and made JOLs for half. Pair type was either randomly intermixed within a list (Experiment 1) or blocked (Experiment 2). We evaluated two hypotheses. The changed-goal hypothesis, proposed by Mitchum, Kelley, and Fox (J Exp Psychol Gen, 2016), states that making JOLs leads learners to notice differences in item difficulty and allocate more resources to learning easier pairs, ultimately leading to higher recall for easier (i.e., related) pairs and impaired recall for more difficult (i.e., unrelated) pairs. In contrast, the positive-reactivity hypothesis predicts increased recall performance for both related and unrelated pairs. As predicted by the positive-reactivity hypothesis, recall performance was higher for pairs that were judged versus not judged on both a mixed and blocked list of related and unrelated pairs. In Experiment 3, we evaluated one proximal mechanism for increased performance for judged pairs: The use of more effective encoding strategies during acquisition. Making JOLs did not influence strategy use, which suggests that the benefit of making JOLs on memory performance results from increased attention. These and other findings converge to support the claim that the requirement to monitor learning benefits memory.