THE EFFECT OF PRACTICE WITH TEST ON THE RELATIVE ACCURACY OF JUDGMENTS OF LEARNING

To investigate what aspects of practice increase the relative accuracy of judgments of learning (JOLs), this study manipulated both JOL timing and type of practice. Three experiments examined the hypotheses that practice with test but not without test improves the relative accuracy of JOLs, and that a similar process mediates the effects of both delay and practice. The results of the experiments revealed that practice without test does not increase the relative accuracy of JOLs, but practice with test does, and that this advantage is different from the advantage caused by delay. These results are discussed in the context of the retrieval hypothesis of memory as well as theories of JOLs

Three Tests and Three Corrections: Comment on Koen and Yonelinas (2010)

The slope of the z-transformed receiver-operating characteristic (zROC) in recognition memory experiments is usually less than 1, which has long been interpreted to mean that the variance of the target distribution is greater than the variance of the lure distribution. The greater variance of the target distribution could arise because the different items on a list receive different increments in memory strength during study (the "encoding variability" hypothesis). In a test of that interpretation

Manipulations of Choice Familiarity in Multiple-Choice Testing Support a Retrieval Practice Account of the Testing Effect

We performed 4 experiments assessing the learning that occurs when taking a test. Our experiments used multiple-choice tests because the processes deployed during testing can be manipulated by varying the nature of the choice alternatives. Previous research revealed that a multiple-choice test that includes "none of the above" (NOTA) produces better performance on a subsequent test only when the correct answer is something other than NOT

Sparse and Distributed Coding of Episodic Memory in Neurons of the Human Hippocampus

Neurocomputational models hold that sparse distributed coding is the most efficient way for hippocampal neurons to encode episodic memories rapidly. We investigated the representation of episodic memory in hippocampal neurons of nine epilepsy patients undergoing intracranial monitoring as they discriminated between recently studied words (targets) and new words (foils) on a recognition test. On average, single units and multiunits exhibited higher spike counts in response to targets relative to foils, and the size of this effect correlated with behavioral performance. Further analyses of the spike-count distributions revealed that (i) a small percentage of recorded neurons responded to any one target and (ii ) a small percentage of targets elicited a strong response in any one neuron. These findings are consistent with the idea that in the human hippocampus episodic memory is supported by a sparse distributed neural code