Publications by authors named "DeSoto K"

What is the best way to predict future memory performance? The intuitive answer is through judgments of learning (JOLs), in which people estimate how likely they are to remember something in the future. Recent theory, however, suggests that a retrospective confidence rating made just after a retrieval attempt might be a better predictor in some situations. In three preregistered experiments, we compared delayed JOLs to confidence ratings.

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Robust scientific knowledge is contingent upon replication of original findings. However, replicating researchers are constrained by resources, and will almost always have to choose one replication effort to focus on from a set of potential candidates. To select a candidate efficiently in these cases, we need methods for deciding which out of all candidates considered would be the most useful to replicate, given some overall goal researchers wish to achieve.

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Collective memory studies show that Americans remember their presidents in a predictable pattern, which can be described as a serial position curve with an additional spike for Abraham Lincoln. However, all prior studies have tested Americans' collective memory for the presidents by their names. How well do Americans know the faces of the presidents? In two experiments, we investigated presidential facial recognition and compared facial recognition to name recognition.

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Confidence-accuracy characteristic (CAC) plots were developed for use in eyewitness identification experiments, and previous findings show that high confidence indicates high accuracy in all studies of adults with an unbiased lineup. We apply CAC plots to standard recognition memory data by calculating response-based and item-based accuracy, one using false alarms and the other using misses. We use both methods to examine the confidence-accuracy relationship for both correct old responses (hits) and new responses (correct rejections).

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Researchers agree that replicability and reproducibility are key aspects of science. A collection of Data Descriptors published in Scientific Data presents data obtained in the process of attempting to replicate previously published research. These new replication data describe published and unpublished projects.

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In two studies, we examined Chinese students' memory for the names of the leaders of China. In Study 1, subjects were cued with the names of periods from China's history. Subjects listed as many leaders as possible from each period and put them in the correct ordinal position when they could (see Roediger and DeSoto, 2014).

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Studies over the past 40 years have shown that Americans can recall about half the U.S. presidents.

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Increasing exemplar variability during category learning can enhance classification of novel exemplars from studied categories. Four experiments examined whether participants preferred variability when making study choices with the goal of later classifying novel exemplars. In Experiments 1-3, participants were familiarised with exemplars of birds from multiple categories prior to making category-level assessments of learning and subsequent choices about whether to receive more variability or repetitions of exemplars during study.

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Two studies examined how U.S. presidents are forgotten.

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Different researchers have reported positive, null, and negative relationships between confidence and accuracy in reports from memory. One possible reason for this paradox is the variety of materials used across experiments, but the two experiments reported in this article show that positive and negative confidence-accuracy correlations can be observed using a single procedure and the same materials. Subjects studied words from semantic categories and then took a recognition test while making confidence ratings.

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The capacity to learn and remember surely evolved to help animals solve problems in their quest to reproduce and survive. In humans we assume that metacognitive processes also evolved, so that we know when to trust what we remember (i.e.

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Intrauterine devices (IUD) provide effective contraception. The current study evaluates the concentration of interleukin-6 (IL-6) and tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-alpha) in the intrauterine fluid of postmenopausal women using an intrauterine delivery system releasing progesterone (IDS-P). Intrauterine fluid was obtained by lavage, and IL-6 and TNF-alpha were analyzed using an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA).

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