Tests have been vastly used for the assessment of learning in educational contexts. Recently, however, a growing body of research has shown that the practice of remembering previously studied information (i.e., retrieval practice) is more advantageous for long-term retention than restudying that same information; a phenomenon often termed "testing effect." The question remains, however, whether such practice can be useful to improve learning in actual educational contexts, and whether in these contexts specific types of tests are particularly beneficial. We addressed these issues by reviewing studies that investigated the use of retrieval practice as a learning strategy in actual educational contexts. The studies reviewed here adopted from free-recall to multiple-choice tests, and involved from elementary school children to medical school students. In general, their results are favorable to the use of retrieval practice in classroom settings, regardless of whether feedback is provided or not. Importantly, however, the majority of the reviewed studies compared retrieval practice to repeated study or to "no-activity." The results of the studies comparing retrieval practice to alternative control conditions were less conclusive, and a subset of them found no advantage for tests. These findings raise the question whether retrieval practice is more beneficial than alternative learning strategies, especially learning strategies and activities already adopted in classroom settings (e.g., concept mapping). Thus, even though retrieval practice emerges as a promising strategy to improve learning in classroom environments, there is not enough evidence available at this moment to determine whether it is as beneficial as alternative learning activities frequently adopted in classroom settings.

We examined the influence of external recommendations on memory attributions. In two experiments, participants were led to believe that they were viewing the responses of two prior students to the same memoranda they were currently judging. However, they were not informed of the reliability of these fictive sources of cues or provided with performance feedback as testing proceeded. Experiment 1 demonstrated improvement in the presence of reliable source cues (75% valid), as compared to uncued recognition, whereas performance was unaltered in the presence of random cues provided by an unreliable source (50% valid). Critically, participants did not ignore the unreliable source, but instead appeared to restrict cue use from both sources to low-confidence trials on which internal evidence was highly unreliable. Experiment 2 demonstrated that participants continued to treat an unreliable source as potentially informative even when it was predominantly incorrect (25% valid), highlighting severe limitations in the ability to adequately discount unreliable or deceptive sources of memory cues. Thus, under anonymous source conditions, observers appear to use a low-confidence outsourcing strategy, wherein they restrict reliance on external cues to situations of low confidence.

Prior studies indicate that, in tests of recognition memory, ERPs elicited by correctly recognized test items differ according to whether the items were encoded in an emotionally arousing or an emotionally neutral study context. These prior studies employed only a relatively brief (ca. 10 min) retention interval, however. The present study contrasted the ERP correlates of incidental emotional retrieval as a function of study-test delay. Pictures of emotionally neutral objects were encoded in association with either emotionally negative or emotionally neutral scenes. In a repeated measures design (N=19), half of the objects were subjected to a recognition memory test 10 min after completion of the study phase, whereas the remainder were tested 24 hrs later. After the short delay, ERPs elicited by objects paired with emotional vs. neutral backgrounds differed from around 200 ms post-stimulus, the objects paired with the emotional scenes eliciting the more positive-going waveforms. After 24 hrs, differences between the ERPs elicited by the two classes of object were still apparent from around 200 ms post-stimulus. Strikingly, these effects differed from those obtained 10 min after study in both their polarity and scalp distribution. The early onset of these ERP effects suggests that they may reflect a form of memory independent of the conscious recollection of the associated study contexts. The qualitative differences in the effects at the two retention intervals raises the possibility that the encoded objects were subjected to consolidation processes that differed according to the emotional attributes of their study contexts.

Our memory experiences typically covary with those of the others’ around us, and on average, an item is more likely to be familiar than not, if a companion recommends it as such. Although it would be ideal if observers could use the external recommendations of others as statistical priors during recognition decisions, it is currently unclear how or if they do so. Furthermore, understanding the sensitivity of recognition judgments to such external cues is critical for understanding memory conformity and eyewitness suggestibility phenomena. To address this we examined recognition accuracy and confidence following cues from an external source (e.g., “Likely old”) that forecast the likely status of upcoming memory probes. Three regularities emerged. First, hit and correction rejection rates expectedly fell when subjects were invalidly versus validly cued. Second, hit confidence was generally higher than correct rejection confidence, regardless of cue validity. Finally, and most noteworthy, cue validity interacted with judgment confidence such that validity heavily influenced the confidence of correct rejections, but had no discernable influence on the confidence of hits. Bootstrap informed Monte Carlo simulation supported a dual process recognition model under which familiarity and recollection processes counteract to heavily dampen the influence of external cues on average reported confidence. A third experiment tested this model using source memory. As predicted, because source memory is heavily governed by contextual recollection, cue validity again did not affect confidence, although as with recognition, it clearly altered accuracy.

The role of lateral parietal cortex during recognition memory is heavily debated. We examined parietal activation during an Explicit Memory Cueing recognition paradigm that biases participants towards expecting novel or familiar stimuli on a trial-by-trial basis using anticipatory cues (“Likely Old”, “Likely New”), compared to trials with neutral cues (“????”). Three qualitatively distinct patterns were observed in the left lateral parietal cortex. An unexpected novelty response occurred in left anterior intraparietal cortex (IPS)/post-central gyrus (PoCG) in which greater activation was observed for new versus old materials following the “Likely Old” cue, but not following the “Likely New” cue. In contrast, anterior angular gyrus demonstrated an unexpected familiarity response with greater activation for old versus new materials following the “Likely New” cue, but not the “Likely Old” cue. Thus these two regions demonstrated increased responses that were selective for either new or old materials respectively, but only when they were unexpected. In contrast, a mid IPS area demonstrated greater response for whichever class of memoranda was unanticipated given the cue condition (an unexpected memory response). Analogous response patterns in regions outside of parietal cortex, and the results of a resting state connectivity analysis, suggested these three response patterns were associated with visuo-spatial orienting following unexpected novelty, source monitoring operations following unexpected familiarity, and general executive control processes following violated expectations. These findings support a Memory Orienting Model of the left lateral parietal cortex in which the region is linked to the investigation of unexpected novelty or familiarity in the environment.