The primary goal of instruction should be to facilitate long-term learning-that is, to create relatively permanent changes in comprehension, understanding, and skills of the types that will support long-term retention and transfer. During the instruction or training process, however, what we can observe and measure is performance, which is often an unreliable index of whether the relatively long-term changes that constitute learning have taken place. The time-honored distinction between learning and performance dates back decades, spurred by early animal and motor-skills research that revealed that learning can occur even when no discernible changes in performance are observed. More recently, the converse has also been shown-specifically, that improvements in performance can fail to yield significant learning-and, in fact, that certain manipulations can have opposite effects on learning and performance. We review the extant literature in the motor- and verbal-learning domains that necessitates the distinction between learning and performance. In addition, we examine research in metacognition that suggests that people often mistakenly interpret their performance during acquisition as a reliable guide to long-term learning. These and other considerations suggest that the learning-performance distinction is critical and has vast practical and theoretical implications.

Recent research has suggested that our memory systems are especially tuned to process information according to its survival relevance, and that inducing problems of "ancestral priorities" faced by our ancestors should lead to optimal recall performance (Nairne & Pandeirada, Cognitive Psychology, 2010). The present study investigated the specificity of this idea by comparing an ancestor-consistent scenario and a modern survival scenario that involved threats that were encountered by human ancestors (e.g., predators) or threats from fictitious creatures (i.e., zombies). Participants read one of four survival scenarios in which the environment and the explicit threat were either consistent or inconsistent with ancestrally based problems (i.e., grasslands-predators, grasslands-zombies, city-attackers, city-zombies), or they rated words for pleasantness. After rating words based on their survival relevance (or pleasantness), the participants performed a free recall task. All survival scenarios led to better recall than did pleasantness ratings, but recall was greater when zombies were the threat, as compared to predators or attackers. Recall did not differ for the modern (i.e., city) and ancestral (i.e., grasslands) scenarios. These recall differences persisted when valence and arousal ratings for the scenarios were statistically controlled as well. These data challenge the specificity of ancestral priorities in survival-processing advantages in memory.

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Two experiments are reported examining how value and relatedness interact to influence metacognitive monitoring and control processes. Participants studied unrelated and related word pairs, each accompanied by point values denoting how important the items were to remember. These values were presented either before or after each pair in a between-subjects design, and participants made item-by-item judgments of learning (JOLs) predicting the likelihood that each item would be remembered later. Results from Experiment 1 showed that participants used value and relatedness as cues to inform their JOLs. Interestingly, JOLs increased as a function of value even in the after condition in which value had no impact on cued recall. Participants in Experiment 2 were permitted to control study time for each item. Results showed that value and relatedness were simultaneously considered when allocating study time. These results support a cue-weighting process in which JOLs and study time allocation are based on multiple cues, which may or may not be predictive of future memory performance, and complements the agenda-based regulation model of study time (Ariel, Dunlosky, & Bailey, 2009) by providing evidence for agenda-based monitoring.

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