Three experiments examined testing effects on learning of natural concepts and metacognitive assessments of such learning. Results revealed that testing enhanced recognition memory and classification accuracy for studied and novel exemplars of bird families on immediate and delayed tests. These effects depended on the balance of study and test trials during training. Metacognitive measures provided results suggesting that participants were aware of the beneficial effects of testing. A new measure of metacognition at the level of categories is introduced and shown to be potentially useful for theory and applied purposes. It is argued that focusing on optimizing the learning of natural concepts encourages the convergence of theorizing about memory, concept learning, and metacognition and holds promise for the development of applications to education.

Reading involves a process of matching an orthographic input with stored representations in lexical memory. The masked priming paradigm has become a standard tool for investigating this process. Use of existing results from this paradigm can be limited by the precision of the data and the need for cross-experiment comparisons that lack normal experimental controls. Here, we present a single, large, high-precision, multi-condition experiment to address these problems. Over 1000 participants from 14 sites responded to 840 trials involving 28 different types of orthographically related primes (e.g., castfe-CASTLE) in a lexical decision task, as well as completing measures of spelling and vocabulary. The data 1.4.1 were indeed highly sensitive to differences between conditions: After correction for multiple comparisons, prime type condition differences of 2.90 ms and above reached significance at the 5% level. This paper presents the method of data collection and preliminary findings from these data, which included replications of the most widely agreed-upon differences between prime types, further evidence for systematic individual differences in susceptibility to priming, and new evidence regarding lexical properties associated with a target word's susceptibility to priming. These analyses will form a basis for the use of these data in quantitative model fitting and evaluation, and future exploration of these data that will inform and motivate new experiments.FORM PRIMING PROJECT 3

The Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM; Roediger & McDermott, 1995) paradigm reliably elicits false memories for critical nonpresented words in recognition tasks. The present studies used a Sternberg (1966) task with DRM lists to determine whether false memories occur in short-term memory tasks and to assess the contribution of latency data in the measurement of false memories. Subjects studied three, five, or seven items from DRM lists and responded to a single probe (studied or nonstudied). In both experiments, critical lures were falsely recognized more often than nonpresented weak associates. Latency data indicated that correct rejections of critical lures were slower than correct rejections of weakly related items at all set sizes. False alarms to critical lures were slower than hits to list items. Latency data can distinguish veridical and false memories in a short-term memory task. Results are discussed in terms of activation-monitoring models of false memory.

The authors examined whether individual differences in fluid intelligence (gF) modulate the testing effect. Participants studied Swahili-English word pairs and repeatedly studied half the pairs or attempted retrieval, with feedback, for the remaining half. Word pairs were easy or difficult to learn. Overall, participants showed a benefit of testing over restudy. However, almost 1/3 of the sample had a negative testing effect and benefitted more from restudy than testing, as well as performing better overall. These individuals self-reported less use of shallower encoding strategies than positive testing effect participants but did not differ in other dimensions. For individuals with a positive testing effect, difficulty had differential effects on participants who scored high or low on a measure of gF, with high gF participants showing larger testing effects for difficult over easy items, whereas low gF participants showed the opposite. Working memory performance was not related to the magnitude of the testing effect; however, vocabulary knowledge revealed a similar pattern as gF, with higher vocabulary associated with a testing effect for difficult but not easy items. This suggests that the benefit of retrieval practice varies with item difficulty and participant abilities. Thus, recommendations to engage in retrieval practice should take into consideration the interactive effects of to-be-learned materials and individual differences in the learners. (PsycINFO Database Record

In two experiments, participants studied two types of word lists. Direct lists were taken from the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm (e.g., water, bridge, run) and contained words directly related to a nonpresented critical item (CI; e.g., river, Roediger & McDermott, 1995). Mediated lists (e.g., faucet, London, jog) contained words related to the CI through a nonpresented mediator. After each study list, participants completed either a recall test, a recall test with a warning about the CI, arithmetic problems, or a recognition test, or they guessed the CI. On a final recognition test, both warning and guessing decreased direct false recognition but increased mediated false recognition, an ironic effect of guessing. An initial recognition test also increased final mediated false recognition. We argue that warning and guessing tasks strengthened associative pathways to the CI, increased the accessibility of associated mediators, and increased monitoring for the CI at test. Increased monitoring was able to reduce CIs from direct, but not mediated, lists.