Erring on the side of caution: Two failures to replicate the derring effect.

It has been claimed that deliberately making errors while studying, even when the correct answers are provided, can enhance memory for the correct answers, a phenomenon termed the derring effect. Such deliberate erring has been shown to outperform other learning techniques, including copying and underlining, elaborative studying with concept mapping, and synonym generation. To date, however, the derring effect has only been demonstrated by a single group of researchers and in a single population of participants.

Investigating immersion and migration decisions for agent-based modelling: A cautionary tale.

Background: Agent-based modelling provides an appealing methodological choice for simulating human behaviour and decisions. The currently dominant approaches based on static transition rates or unverified assumptions are restrictive, and could be enhanced with insights from cognitive experiments on actual decision making. Here, one common concern is that standard surveys or experiments may lack ecological validity, limiting the extent to which research findings can be generalised to real-life settings.

Mean rating difference scores are poor measures of discernment: The role of response criteria.

Many interventions aim to protect people from misinformation. Here, we review common measures used to assess their efficacy. Some measures only assess the target behavior (e.

Gamified inoculation interventions do not improve discrimination between true and fake news: Reanalyzing existing research with receiver operating characteristic analysis.

Gamified inoculation interventions designed to improve the detection of online misinformation are becoming increasingly prevalent. Two of the most notable interventions of this kind are Bad News and Go Viral!. To assess their efficacy, prior research has typically used pre-post designs in which participants rated the reliability or manipulativeness of true and fake news items before and after playing these games, while most of the time also including a control group who played an irrelevant game (Tetris) or did nothing at all.

Effects of inductive learning and gamification on news veracity discernment.

This preregistered study tests a novel psychological intervention to improve news veracity discernment. The main intervention involved inductive learning (IL) training (i.e.

How safe is this trip? Judging personal safety in a pandemic based on information from different sources.

In a preregistered experiment, we presented participants with information about the safety of traveling during a deadly pandemic and during a migration trip using five different sources (a news article, a family member, an official organization, someone with personal experience, and the travel organizer) and four different verbal descriptions of the likelihood of safety ( and ). We found that both for the pandemic and migration contexts, judgments about the likelihood of safely traveling and decisions to travel were most strongly influenced by information from the respective official organizations and that participants also indicated greater willingness to share information from official organizations with others. These results are consistent with the established finding that expert sources are more persuasive.

Can you trust what you hear? Concurrent misinformation affects recall memory and judgments of guilt.

In most misinformation studies, participants are exposed to a to-be-remembered event and then subsequently given misinformation in textual form. This misinformation impacts people's ability to accurately report the initial event. In this article, we present 2 experiments that explored a different approach to presenting misinformation.

Repeated exposure to exemplars does not enhance implicit learning: A puzzle for models of learning and memory.

We learn regularities in the world around us, frequently without conscious effort, a phenomenon known as implicit learning. These regularities are often impossible to verbalise. One example of implicit learning is , in which participants learn a rule set combining two factors, such as lexical frequency and concreteness.

New improved gamma: Enhancing the accuracy of Goodman-Kruskal's gamma using ROC curves.

For decades, researchers have debated the relative merits of different measures of people's ability to discriminate the correctness of their own responses (resolution). The probabilistic approach, primarily led by Nelson, has advocated the Goodman-Kruskal gamma coefficient, an ordinal measure of association. The signal detection approach has advocated parametric measures of distance between the evidence distributions or the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve.

Effects of postwarning specificity on memory performance and confidence in the eyewitness misinformation paradigm.

The influence of postevent misinformation on memory is typically constrained by postwarnings, but little is known about the effectiveness of particular features of postwarnings, such as their specificity. Experiment 1 compared 2 levels of postwarning specificity: A general postwarning just stated the presence of misinformation, whereas a specific postwarning identified the test items for which misinformation had been presented earlier. The specific postwarning, but not the general postwarning, eliminated both the misinformation effect and its deleterious impact on memory monitoring (using a classic 2-alternative forced-choice recognition procedure).

Beyond hypercorrection: remembering corrective feedback for low-confidence errors.

Correcting errors based on corrective feedback is essential to successful learning. Previous studies have found that corrections to high-confidence errors are better remembered than low-confidence errors (the hypercorrection effect). The aim of this study was to investigate whether corrections to low-confidence errors can also be successfully retained in some cases.

Auditory hindsight bias: Fluency misattribution versus memory reconstruction.

We report 4 experiments investigating auditory hindsight bias-the tendency to overestimate the intelligibility of distorted auditory stimuli after learning their identity. An associative priming manipulation was used to vary the amount of processing fluency independently of prior target knowledge. For hypothetical designs, in which hindsight judgments are made for peers in foresight, we predicted that judgments would be based on processing fluency and that hindsight bias would be greater in the unrelated- compared to related-prime context (differential-fluency hypothesis).

Confidence in forced-choice recognition: What underlies the ratings?

Two-alternative forced-choice recognition tests are commonly used to assess recognition accuracy that is uncontaminated by changes in bias. In such tests, participants are asked to endorse the studied item out of 2 presented alternatives. Participants may be further asked to provide confidence judgments for their recognition decisions.

Memory, metamemory, and social cues: Between conformity and resistance.

When presented with responses of another person, people incorporate these responses into memory reports: a finding termed memory conformity. Research on memory conformity in recognition reveals that people rely on external social cues to guide their memory responses when their own ability to respond is at chance. In this way, conforming to a reliable source boosts recognition performance but conforming to a random source does not impair it.

Judgments of learning index relative confidence, not subjective probability.

The underconfidence-with-practice (UWP) effect is a common finding in calibration studies concerned with judgments of learning (JOLs) elicited on a percentage scale. The UWP pattern is present when, in a procedure consisting of multiple study-test cycles, the mean scale JOLs underestimate the mean recall performance on Cycle 2 and beyond. Although this pattern is present both for items recalled and unrecalled on the preceding cycle, to date research has concentrated mostly on the sources of UWP for the latter type of items.

Memory and metacognition in dangerous situations: investigating cognitive impairment from gas narcosis in undersea divers.

Objective: The current study tested whether undersea divers are able to accurately judge their level of memory impairment from inert gas narcosis.

Background: Inert gas narcosis causes a number of cognitive impairments, including a decrement in memory ability. Undersea divers may be unable to accurately judge their level of impairment, affecting safety and work performance.

Management of menopausal symptoms for breast cancer patients.

Background: Menopausal symptoms are commonly experienced in women treated for breast cancer. This project aimed to identify the types and prevalence of menopausal symptoms women experience and assess how well such symptoms are managed by means of a clinical audit. The authors also wanted to identify whether patients and health professionals require further education in this area to enhance patients' quality of life.

A little bias goes a long way: the effects of feedback on the strategic regulation of accuracy on formula-scored tests.

Under formula-scoring rules for multiple-choice exams, a penalty is applied to incorrect responses to reduce noise in the observed score. To avoid the penalty individuals are allowed to "pass," and therefore they must be able to strategically regulate the accuracy of their reporting by deciding which and how many questions to answer. To investigate the effect of bias within this framework, Higham (2007) introduced bias profiles, which show the score obtained under formula scoring (corrected score) as a function of the omission rate.

The dud-alternative effect in memory for associations: putting confidence into local context.

When participants are asked to provide confidence judgments for each provided alternative in a multiple-choice memory task, such judgments are inflated if the assessed alternatives are accompanied by an implausible (dud) alternative. This finding, termed the dud-alternative effect, has been recently documented in a memory setting with a lineup procedure (Charman, Wells, & Joy, Law & Human Behavior 35:479-500 2011). In the present study, we developed a novel paradigm to investigate the dud-alternative effect in memory.

Dissociating early- and late-selection processes in recall: the mixed blessing of categorized study lists.

Two experiments are reported in which we used type-2 signal detection theory to separate the effects of semantic categorization on early- and late-selection processes in free and cued recall. In Experiment 1, participants studied cue-target pairs for which the targets belonged to two, six, or 24 semantic categories, and later the participants were required to recall the targets either with (cued recall) or without (free recall) the studied cues. A confidence rating and a report decision were also required, so that we could compute both forced-report quantity and metacognitive resolution (type-2 discrimination), which served as our estimates of early- and late-selection processes, respectively.

Implicit learning of conjunctive rule sets: an alternative to artificial grammars.

A single experiment is reported that investigated implicit learning using a conjunctive rule set applied to natural words. Participants memorized a training list consisting of words that were either rare-concrete and common-abstract or common-concrete and rare-abstract. At test, they were told of the rule set, but not told what it was.

Measuring manual dexterity and anxiety in divers using a novel task at 35-41 m.

Background: Nitrogen narcosis has a detrimental impact on the manual dexterity of divers and prior research has suggested that this impairment may be magnified by anxiety. Preliminary findings of the effects of depth (i.e.

Expertise and gambling: using type 2 signal detection theory to investigate differences between regular gamblers and nongamblers.

This paper presents an experimental investigation into how individuals make decisions under uncertainty when faced with different payout structures in the context of gambling. Type 2 signal detection theory was utilized to compare sensitivity to bias manipulations between regular nonproblem gamblers and nongamblers in a novel probability-based gambling task. The results indicated that both regular gamblers and nongamblers responded to the changes of rewards for correct responses (Experiment 1) and penalties for errors (Experiment 2) in setting their gambling criteria, but that regular gamblers were more sensitive to these manipulations of bias.

Regulation of memory accuracy with multiple answers: the plurality option.

We report two experiments that investigated the regulation of memory accuracy with a new regulatory mechanism: the plurality option. This mechanism is closely related to the grain-size option but involves control over the number of alternatives contained in an answer rather than the quantitative boundaries of a single answer. Participants were presented with a slideshow depicting a robbery (Experiment 1) or a murder (Experiment 2), and their memory was tested with five-alternative multiple-choice questions.