When is guessing incorrectly better than studying for enhancing memory?

Abstract

Recently, Kornell, Hays, and Bjork (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 35:989-998, 2009) demonstrated that incorrect guessing can benefit subsequent memory to a greater degree than can an equivalent amount of study time. We explored this intriguing finding to determine which factors moderate the advantage of incorrect guessing relative to study. In contrast to the findings of Kornell et al., our Experiment 1 revealed that incorrect guessing resulted in worse performance than did studying and that the number of incorrect guesses did not moderate the effect. In contrast, Experiment 2 revealed that the timing of subsequent study moderated the effectiveness of incorrect guessing over study. Final test performance was greater for incorrectly guessed items than for prestudied items when a subsequent study opportunity occurred immediately after the pretrial, whereas the pattern reversed when subsequent study was delayed. This crossover interaction emerged largely because prestudy items showed a classic spacing effect, whereas the guess items did not. One plausible explanation for the absence of a spacing benefit for guess items is that delaying the subsequent study trial increases source-monitoring errors during retrieval, such that participants confuse their original guess with the correctly studied target. However, Experiment 3 provided evidence against this source-monitoring account. We concluded by discussing other possible accounts of why the timing of study could moderate the effectiveness of incorrect guessing.

Multiple-choice pretesting potentiates learning of related information

“…Additionally, this pattern of results would seem to call for a reconsideration of claims made by proponents of errorless learning, who would argue that the making of errors should be avoided during learning activities, with the assumption that such errors will tend to persist and thereby impair future correct learning (e.g., Guthrie, 1952;Skinner, 1958). We also see the pattern of results obtained in the present Experiments 1 and 2 to be consistent with findings observed by Kornell et al (2009;see also, Carpenter, 2011;Grimaldi & Karpicke, 2012;Hays, Kornell, & Bjork 2013;Huelser & Metcalfe, 2012;Knight, Ball, Brewer, DeWitt, & Marsh, 2012;Kornell, 2014;Vaughn & Rawson, 2012;Yue et al 2015) in their research on test-potentiated learning.…”

Why does guessing incorrectly enhance, rather than impair, retention?

“…Intrusion rates of guesses into the blank space provided for targets and vice versa were very low: Guesses intruded into recall of targets only 1.4 % of the time (SD = 3.1 %), and targets intruded into recall of guesses only 2.9 % of the time (SD = 4.8 %). Thus, there was no evidence that initial guesses were suppressed, replicating the findings of Vaughn and Rawson (2012) and Knight et al (2012).…”

“…In their study-only condition, on the other hand, pairs such as Whale: Mammal were shown for the full 13 s. The guess-first condition produced better later recall of the correct target than did the study-only condition, despite the shorter study time and the reasonable expectation that generating a competing associate would create proactive interference. Kornell et al's basic finding has now been replicated by a number of other investigators (Grimaldi & Karpicke, 2012;Hays, Kornell, & Bjork, 2013;Huelser & Metcalfe, 2012;Knight, Ball, Brewer, DeWitt, & Marsh, 2012;Vaughn & Rawson, 2012), as well as with foreign language learning (Potts & Shanks, 2014) and more semantically rich text passages (Richland, Kornell, & Kao, 2009) and trivia facts (Kornell, 2014).…”

“…Prior studies have used very short retention intervals in which participants are readily able to retrieve their initial guesses and to distinguish their guesses from the correct targets (e.g., Knight et al, 2012;Vaughn & Rawson, 2012). A question that remains, however, is whether incorrect guesses might become interfering at a long delay.…”

“…The errorful generation paradigm-as used by Kornell et al and in subsequent follow-up studies (Grimaldi & Karpicke, 2012;Huelser & Metcalfe, 2012;Knight et al, 2012;Potts & Shanks, 2014;Vaughn & Rawson, 2012)-ensures that the guess is almost always wrong, leaving open the possibility that when presented with the cue at final test, participants are able to simply select whatever response they did not generate for themselves. Therefore, we rigged Experiment 2 so that, in one condition, half of participants' guesses were always deemed to be correct, and compared the benefit of making errors in this condition with the original condition where just about all the guesses were incorrect.…”