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

Abstract

The finding that trying, and failing, to predict the upcoming to-be-remembered response to a given cue can enhance later recall of that response, relative to studying the intact cue-response pair, is surprising, especially given that the standard paradigm (e.g., Kornell, Hays, & Bjork, 2009) involves allocating what would otherwise be study time to generating an error. In three experiments, we sought to eliminate two potential heuristics that participants might use to aid recall of correct responses on the final test and to explore the effects of interference both at an immediate and at a delayed test. In Experiment 1, by intermixing strongly associated to-be-remembered pairs with weakly associated pairs, we eliminated a potential heuristic participants can use on the final test in the standard version of the paradigm-namely, that really strong associates are incorrect responses. In Experiment 2, by rigging half of the participants' responses to be correct, we eliminated another potential heuristic-namely, that one's initial guesses are virtually always wrong. In Experiment 3, we examined whether participants' ability to remember-and discriminate between-their incorrect guesses and correct responses would be lost after a 48-h delay, when source memory should be reduced. Across all experiments, we continued to find a robust benefit of trying to guess to-be-learned responses, even when incorrect, versus studying intact cue-response pairs. The benefits of making incorrect guesses are not an artifact of the paradigm, nor are they limited to short retention intervals.

Learning from failure: Errorful generation improves memory for items, not associations

“…Thus, while the total duration of the trials in each encoding condition was matched, the target was presented for longer in the Study condition than in the Meaning and First Word conditions. We chose to match the overall trial duration of the encoding conditions rather than the target presentation alone to be consistent with both Potts and Shanks' experiments and many others on the topic of unsuccessful retrieval (e.g., Knight et al, 2012;Yan et al, 2014;Yang et al, 2017). Indeed, Potts and Shanks' results are especially interesting precisely because errorful generation was beneficial even though it was at the expense of study time.…”

“…First, generating errors improved cued recall even when there was less time to encode the correct target in the test condition than in the study condition. Second, there was more scope for incorrect guesses to have interfered with the participants' memory of the targets (Huelser & Metcalfe, 2012;Yan, Yu, Garcia, & Bjork, 2014). Thus, the benefits of generating errors appeared to outweigh the costs of less study time and more interference.…”

Desirable Difficulties in Vocabulary Learning

“…That such generation attempts, even when they are assured of being incorrect, can improve subsequent memory for the correct response has drawn a great deal of recent interest (Grimaldi & Karpicke, 2012; Hays, Kornell, & Bjork, 2013; Huelser & Metcalfe, 2012; Knight, Ball, Brewer, DeWitt, & Marsh, 2012; Kornell, Hays, & Bjork, 2009; Potts & Shanks, 2014; Yan, Yu, Garcia, & Bjork, 2014). An experimental paradigm introduced by Kornell et al (2009) has triggered much of this interest.…”

Selective effects of errorful generation on recognition memory: the role of motivation and surprise

“…Support for this view comes from studies showing that generating errors during learning sometimes impairs memory on subsequent tests (Baddeley & Wilson, 1994;Forlano & Hoffman, 1937;Kessels & De Haan, 2003;Squires, Hunkin, & Parkin, 1997). The more frequent finding in recent years, however, is that errors aid learning (Cyr & Anderson, 2015;Grimaldi & Karpicke, 2012;Hays, Kornell, & Bjork, 2013;Huelser & Metcalfe, 2012;Kane & Anderson, 1978;Knight, Ball, Brewer, DeWitt, & Marsh, 2012;Kornell, 2014;Kornell, Hays, & Bjork, 2009;Richland, Kornell, & Kao, 2009;Slamecka & Fevreiski, 1983;Tanaka, Miyatani, & Iwaki, 2019;Vaughn & Rawson, 2012;Yan, Yu, Garcia, & Bjork, 2014;Yang, Potts, & Shanks, 2017;Zawadzka & Hanczakowski, 2018). In these cases, failed tests are beneficial, and they can even be as beneficial as successful tests (Kornell, Jacobs Klein, & Rawson, 2015).…”