Cue generation: How learners flexibly support future retrieval

Abstract

The successful use of memory requires us to be sensitive to the cues that will be present during retrieval. In many situations, we have some control over the external cues that we will encounter. For instance, learners create shopping lists at home to help remember what items to later buy at the grocery store, and they generate computer file names to help remember the contents of those files. Generating cues in the service of later cognitive goals is a complex task that lies at the intersection of metacognition, communication, and memory. In this series of experiments, we investigated how and how well learners generate external mnemonic cues. Across 5 experiments, learners generated a cue for each target word in a to-be-remembered list and received these cues during a later cued recall test. Learners flexibly generated cues in response to different instructional demands and study list compositions. When generating mnemonic cues, as compared to descriptions of target items, learners produced cues that were more distinct than mere descriptions and consequently elicited greater cued recall performance than those descriptions. When learners were aware of competing targets in the study list, they generated mnemonic cues with smaller cue-to-target associative strength but that were even more distinct. These adaptations led to fewer confusions among competing targets and enhanced cued recall performance. These results provide another example of the metacognitively sophisticated tactics that learners use to effectively support future retrieval.Keywords Cue generation . Metacognition . Control When taking notes in meetings, making to-do lists, outlining readings, and naming computer files, learners support later retrieval by generating cues for their future selves. Learners create external cues to reduce the demands placed on their limited memories. The ability of a learner to remember target information may fade over time; a good external cue can sustain memory retrieval in the face of considerable forgetting. Generating external cues to support later retrieval plays a vital role in many real-world activities and carries serious consequences. For example, patients often set up memory cues, like pill boxes and cell phone reminders, to aid in their adherence to medications. In the current experiments, we examined how learners generate cues to support later memory retrieval. More specifically, we analyzed how the characteristics of selfgenerated cues differed under various instructional conditions and with various stimulus sets. In the first trio of experiments (Experiments 1-3), we examined how learners intentionally generate cues for themselves and evaluated the characteristics of intentional mnemonic cues. In the second series of experiments (Experiments 4-5) we analyzed whether learners adjust their cues based upon the characteristics of the to-beremembered set of stimuli.Although there is not a large body of research on cue generation in mnemonic tasks, learners must exercise accurate metacognitive control wh...

Using Self-Generated Cues to Facilitate Recall: A Narrative Review

“…In this sense, other-generated cues can be considered to rely primarily upon associative strength (between cue and target), without the additional benefit of cue distinctiveness and encoding-retrieval match offered by self-generated cues. In support of this, Tullis (2013) highlights that when learners recalled an incorrect target, this response appeared to be driven by the associative strength between the cue and the incorrect response. This suggests that when learners are unable to access specific episodic details for a cue they resort to a ‘best guess’ based upon associates of the cue provided to them.…”

“…It has been suggested that gist traces are likely to be activated by a wider range of retrieval cues than verbatim traces ( Tuckey and Brewer, 2003 ). This means that more distinct retrieval cues are necessary to access detailed target information ( Bellezza and Hoyt, 1992 ; Tullis and Benjamin, 2015a ).…”

“…When generating cues ourselves we are able to rely upon rich, unique, personal knowledge to produce cues which are often distinctive, highly associated with the target, and consistent between encoding and retrieval (and therefore stable over time). Research has demonstrated that individuals do not consistently favor any one of these principles over the others when self-generating retrieval cues; instead, they utilize these characteristics flexibly to fit with the current task demands ( Tullis and Benjamin, 2015a ). For example, when learners are provided with information about the similarity of competing targets (they were made aware that targets were similar to one another) prior to generating their cues, they focused more on distinguishing between the targets through maximizing cue distinctiveness, and so improved their performance on a recall task ( Tullis and Benjamin, 2015a ).…”

“…Research has suggested that the most effective self-generated cues are likely to have been developed with the explicit purpose of cueing later retrieval. This helps individuals to make deliberate choices distinguishing the target from other items stored within memory, rather than merely describing the properties of the target ( Tullis and Benjamin, 2015a ). In this way, developing self-generated cues can be considered as an active process, resulting in cues which uniquely and functionally represent the critical properties of the target memory ( Mäntylä and Nilsson, 1983 ).…”

“…In this way, developing self-generated cues can be considered as an active process, resulting in cues which uniquely and functionally represent the critical properties of the target memory ( Mäntylä and Nilsson, 1983 ). For example, when learners were told directly that the cues they generated would be used to guide a future retrieval attempt (mnemonic cues), their cues tended to include more idiosyncratic knowledge and personal experience, were more distinctive, and associated to fewer potential targets, and so facilitated greater levels of recall than cues generated to simply describe the target ( Tullis and Benjamin, 2015a ). Self-generated cues are likely to include idiosyncratic details based upon the personal context of encoding.…”