An official website of the United States government
The pretesting effect is a robust learning strategy whereby attempting to answer questions about a topic before learning it results in better memory of that topic compared to simply studying the topic without taking a pretest. We investigated whether age and memory contentment, factors underexplored in the literature, moderate the pretesting effect, and whether judgments of pretesting effectiveness varied across ages. We found that the pretesting effect was not moderated by either factor, but participants 18-39 yrs reported pretesting to be better for learning whereas 40-50 year-old participants reported studying to be better for learning. These results suggest that the pretesting effect appears to be robust throughout adulthood, but the metacognitive benefits of its effectiveness differ by age.
more »
« less
This content will become publicly available on May 1, 2026
The pretesting effect is robust throughout adulthood, but metacognitive beliefs about pretesting and challenge differ
Pretesting—asking learners to try to answer questions about a topic before learning—results in better memory of that topic compared to simply studying the topic without taking a pretest. We investigated whether age and memory contentment moderate the benefit of pretesting, and whether judgments of pretesting effectiveness varied across adulthood (N = 273, age range: 18-82). The pretesting effect was not moderated by either factor. Metacognitive judgments, however, varied by age. Younger participants were more likely to appreciate the benefits of pretesting than middle-aged and older adults. In Study 2 (N = 296, age range: 18-83), our mixed-methods approach showed converging results: The older the participant, the less likely they were to appreciate the benefits of errors and think that pretesting would be effective for them. These results suggest that although the pretesting effect appears to be robust throughout adulthood, metacognitive beliefs differ.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2238567
- PAR ID:
- 10620790
- Publisher / Repository:
- Elsevier
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Learning and Individual Differences
- Volume:
- 120
- Issue:
- C
- ISSN:
- 1041-6080
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 102683
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- pretesting challenge beliefs lifespan desirable difficulties metacognition
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Age-related declines in episodic memory do not affect all types of mnemonic information equally: when to-be-remembered information is in line with one’s prior knowledge, or schema-congruent, older adults often show no impairments. There are two major accounts of this effect: One proposes that schemas compensate for memory failures in aging, and the other proposes that schemas instead actively impair older adults’ otherwise intact memory for incongruent information. However, the evidence thus far is inconclusive, likely due to methodological constraints in teasing apart these complex underlying dynamics. We developed a paradigm that separately examines the contributions of underlying memory and schema knowledge to a final memory decision, allowing these dynamics to be examined directly. In the present study, healthy older and younger adults first searched for target objects in congruent or incongruent locations within scenes. In a subsequent test, participants indicated where in each scene the target had been located previously, and provided confidence-based recognition memory judgments that indexed underlying memory, in terms of recollection and familiarity, for the background scenes. We found that age-related increases in schema effects on target location spatial recall were predicted and statistically mediated by age-related increases in underlying memory failures, specifically within recollection. We also found that, relative to younger adults, older adults had poorer spatial memory precision within recollected scenes but slightly better precision within familiar scenes—and age increases in schema bias were primarily exhibited within recollected scenes. Interestingly, however, there were also slight age-related increases in schema effects that could not be explained by memory deficits alone, outlining a role for active schema influences as well. Together, these findings support the account that age-related schema effects on memory are compensatory in that they are driven primarily by underlying memory failures, and further suggest that age-related deficits in memory precision may also drive schema effects.more » « less
-
The ability to use past experience to effectively guide decision-making declines in older adulthood. Such declines have been theorized to emerge from either impairments of striatal reinforcement learning systems (RL) or impairments of recurrent networks in prefrontal and parietal cortex that support working memory (WM). Distinguishing between these hypotheses has been challenging because either RL or WM could be used to facilitate successful decision-making in typical laboratory tasks. Here we investigated the neurocomputational correlates of age-related decision-making deficits using an RL-WM task to disentangle these mechanisms, a computational model to quantify them, and magnetic resonance spectroscopy to link them to their molecular bases. Our results reveal that task performance is worse in older age, in a manner best explained by working memory deficits, as might be expected if cortical recurrent networks were unable to sustain persistent activity across multiple trials. Consistent with this, we show that older adults had lower levels of prefrontal glutamate, the excitatory neurotransmitter thought to support persistent activity, compared to younger adults. Individuals with the lowest prefrontal glutamate levels displayed the greatest impairments in working memory after controlling for other anatomical and metabolic factors. Together, our results suggest that lower levels of prefrontal glutamate may contribute to failures of working memory systems and impaired decision-making in older adulthood.more » « less
-
While judgments of agency were once construed as metacognitive in nature, recent experimental and computational work has shown that agency judgments do not (always) depend on metacognitive resources (Constant et al., 2022; Wen et al., 2023). This development has left the role of metacognitive in generating the subjective experience of agency largely uncharacterized. We measured psychometric thresholds (i.e. first order sensitivity) and metacognitive sensitives for sensorimotor agency judgments, as well as high-level beliefs about one’s agency using an established scale. We found, among a large (n=195) sample, that the relationship between subjects’ moment-by-moment judgments of control and their high-level beliefs was almost entirely mediated by metacognitive access, revealing a novel role of metacognition in linking experiences of agency with the belief of being an agent.more » « less
-
Rosenbaum, Janet E (Ed.)Vaccine hesitancy remains an issue in the United States. This study conducted an online survey [N = 3,013] using the Social Science Research Solution [SSRS] Opinion Panel web panelists, representative of U.S. adults age 18 and older who use the internet, with an oversample of rural-dwelling and minority populations between April 8 and April 22, 2021- as vaccine eligibility opened to the country. We examined the relationship between COVID-19 exposure and socio-demographics with vaccine intentions [eager-to-take, wait-and-see, undecided, refuse] among the unvaccinated using multinomial logistic regressions [ref: fully/partially vaccinated]. Results showed vaccine intentions varied by demographic characteristics and COVID-19 experience during the period that eligibility for the vaccine was extended to all adults. At the time of the survey approximately 40% of respondents were unvaccinated; 41% knew someone who had died of COVID-19, and 38% had experienced financial hardship as a result of the pandemic. The vaccinated were more likely to be highly educated, older adults, consistent with the United States initial eligibility criteria. Political affiliation and financial hardship experienced during the pandemic were the two most salient factors associated with being undecided or unwilling to take the vaccine.more » « less
