The role of warnings in younger and older adults' retrieval-induced forgetting.

Retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) is a phenomenon wherein practicing recalling some items impairs recall of semantically related, unpracticed items. Two experiments examined whether explicitly warning older (Experiment 1) and younger adults (Experiments 1 and 2) about RIF at different times during two exposures to the retrieval-practice paradigm would affect participants' forgetting. Participants in both experiments were either warned before encoding, retrieval-practice, recall, or not at all.