Papers by Jonathan Tullis
Students consistently report multitasking (e.g., checking social media, texting, watching Netflix... more Students consistently report multitasking (e.g., checking social media, texting, watching Netflix) when studying on their own (e.g.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, Mar 1, 2020
In student-regulated instruction, guiding one's study effectively and efficiently is crucial for ... more In student-regulated instruction, guiding one's study effectively and efficiently is crucial for successful learning. Yet, significant variability exists in how effectively learners regulate their own study. Here, we explored whether and how beliefs about the nature of intelligence affect learners' metacognitive control and ultimately the efficacy of their study choices. We manipulated learners' theories of intelligence across two experiments. Learners then studied a list of words for a later memory test, chose half of the words to restudy, and restudied their chosen items. Learners who were persuaded to believe intelligence was malleable chose to restudy more poorly learned items and ultimately learned more than learners who were persuaded to believe intelligence was fixed. Learners' underlying beliefs about the nature of intelligence may affect learners' goals and ultimately their metacognitive control.
Memory, Sep 21, 2021
ABSTRACT From writing to-do lists to creating mnemonic devices in school, people frequently gener... more ABSTRACT From writing to-do lists to creating mnemonic devices in school, people frequently generate cues to help them remember information. Creating memory cues is a vital aspect of metacognition and allows learners to somewhat control their retrieval circumstances. Across three experiments, we tested the extent to which self-generated memory cues fail at long retention intervals because they are based in fleeting mental states. Participants studied target words and generated mnemonic cues for themselves or for others. Cues intended for others showed greater cue-to-target associative strength, were less distinctive, and were less idiosyncratic (more common) than cues intended for oneself. However, the effectiveness of the cues in supporting recall did not differ by intended recipient at medium (∼3 days) or long (∼1 year) retention intervals. In the third experiment, we directly tested the stability of self-generated cues for oneself (compared to cues for others, descriptions of the target, and focused descriptions) by asking participants to generate cues twice for the same targets across a delay of 3 weeks. Cues intended for others were more stable than all other cues, but the stability of the cues did not affect long term retention. Implications for effective cue generation are discussed.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2014
One aspect of successful cognition is the efficient use of prior relevant knowledge in novel situ... more One aspect of successful cognition is the efficient use of prior relevant knowledge in novel situations. Remindings-stimulus-guided retrievals of prior events-allow us to link prior knowledge to current problems by prompting us to retrieve relevant knowledge from events that are distant from the present. Theorizing in research on higher cognition makes much use of the concept of remindings, yet many basic mnemonic consequences of remindings are untested. Here we consider implications of reminding-based theories of the effects of repetition on memory (Benjamin & Tullis, 2010; Hintzman, 2011). Those theories suggest that the spacing of repeated presentations of material benefits memory when the later experience reminds the learner of the earlier one. When applied to memory for related, rather than repeated, material, these theories predict a reminding effect: a mnemonic boost caused by a nearby presentation of a related item. In 7 experiments, we assessed this prediction by having learners study lists of words that contained related word pairs. Recall performance for the first presentation in related pairs was higher than for equivalent items in unrelated pairs, while recognition performance for items in related pairs did not differ from those in unrelated pairs. Remindings benefit only the recollection of the retrieved episodes.
Journal of Memory and Language, Dec 1, 2021
Encountering events that are meaningfully related to prior episodes can prompt retrieval of those... more Encountering events that are meaningfully related to prior episodes can prompt retrieval of those prior events. Reminders are events that prompt retrieval of prior learned information, while reminded materials are the events that are retrieved in response. Reminders are an important component of efficient and effective cognition because they partially automate the process of bringing relevant prior knowledge to bear on novel situations. Across four experiments, we investigated whether reminders boosts memory for the entire prior reminded episode or for only specific aspects of prior experiences that are relevant to the reminder. To do so, we combined a reminding procedure with a paradigm for measuring memory for the incidental context of encoding. Participants studied lists of words in which semantically related pairs (e.g., "volcano" and "erupt") were presented across brief lags and in different color contexts. Memory for the content and color of the first-presented word in pairs (the reminded information) was measured. Recall of related word pairs was consistently greater than recall of unrelated pairs, in agreement with prior work on the reminding effect. However, when the color of related words differed across the pair, memory for the color of the reminded words was impaired compared to unrelated words. The results support a view of reminding as a leveling and sharpening process in which memory for the focal content of reminded episodes is enhanced, but differences in peripheral details are smoothed over. Such a process can lead to the acquisition and application of prototypical knowledge over experience.
Metacognition and Learning, May 7, 2020
Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Science+Bu... more Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature. This e-offprint is for personal use only and shall not be self-archived in electronic repositories. If you wish to selfarchive your article, please use the accepted manuscript version for posting on your own website. You may further deposit the accepted manuscript version in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later and provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website. The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The final publication is available at link.springer.com".
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, Jul 9, 2013
Remindings-stimulus-guided retrievals of prior events-may help us interpret ambiguous events by l... more Remindings-stimulus-guided retrievals of prior events-may help us interpret ambiguous events by linking the current situation to relevant prior experiences. Evidence suggests that remindings play an important role in interpreting complex ambiguous stimuli (Ross & Bradshaw, 1994); here we evaluate whether remindings influence word interpretation and memory in a new paradigm. Learners studied words on distinct visual backgrounds and generated a sentence for each word. Homographs were either preceded by a biasing cue on the same background three items earlier, preceded by a biasing cue on a different background three items earlier, or followed by a biasing cue on the same background three items later. When biasing cues preceded the homographs on the same backgrounds as the homographs, the meanings of the homographs in learner-generated sentences were consistent with the biasing cues more often than the other two conditions. These results show that remindings can influence word interpretation. In addition, later memory for the homographs and cues was greater when the meaning of the homograph in the sentence was consistent with the earlier biasing cue, suggesting that remindings enhanced mnemonic performance. Remindings play an important role in how we interpret ambiguous stimuli and enhance memory for the involved material.
Memory & Cognition, Jul 17, 2018
Predicting what others know is vital to countless social and educational interactions. For exampl... more Predicting what others know is vital to countless social and educational interactions. For example, the ability of teachers to accurately estimate what knowledge students have has been identified as a crucial component of effective teaching. I propose the knowledge estimation as cue-utilization framework, in which judges use a variety of available and salient metacognitive cues to estimate what others know. In three experiments, I tested three hypotheses of this framework: namely, that participants do not automatically ground estimates of others' knowledge in their own knowledge, that judgment conditions shift how participants weight different cues, and that participants differentially weight cues based upon their diagnosticity. Predictions of others' knowledge were dynamically generated by judges who weighed a variety of available and salient cues. Just as the accuracy of metacognitive monitoring of one's own learning depends upon the conditions under which judgments of self are elicited, the bases and accuracy of metacognitive judgments for others depends upon the conditions under which they are elicited. Keywords Metacognition. Monitoring. Perspective taking Accurately predicting what others know is crucial to thriving in a social environment. Teachers who can accurately judge how challenging information is can effectively tailor their pedagogy to support student learning (Sadler, Sonnert, Coyle, Cook-Smith, & Miller, 2013). Politicians and advertisers who can predict what audiences will understand can successfully craft persuasive m e s s a g e s. E s t i m a t i n g o t h e r s ' k n o w l e d g e i s Bindispensable to human social functioning^(p. 85; Nelson, Kruglanski, & Jost, 1998). Here, based in Thomas and Jacoby (2013), I will present a cueutilization framework that posits estimates of others' knowledge are produced by weighing a variety of available and salient cues, and I will test that theory across three experiments. I will first outline two existing theories of knowledge estimation (knowledge estimation as static knowledge and knowledge estimation as anchoring and adjustment) before detailing the proposed theory of knowledge estimation as cue utilization.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 2013
Rating scales are a standard measurement tool in psychological research. However, research sugges... more Rating scales are a standard measurement tool in psychological research. However, research suggests that the cognitive burden involved in maintaining the criteria used to parcel subjective evidence into ratings introduces decision noise and affects estimates of performance in the underlying task. There has been debate over whether such decision noise is evident in recognition, with some authors arguing that it is substantial and others arguing that it is trivial or nonexistent. Here we directly assess the presence of decision noise by evaluating whether the length of a rating scale on which recognition judgments are provided is inversely related to performance on the recognition task. That prediction was confirmed: rating scales with more options led to lower estimates of recognition than scales with fewer options. This result supports the claim that decision noise contributes to recognition judgments and additionally suggests that caution is warranted when using rating scales more generally. Rating scales are among the most widely used measurement tools in psychology. They provide the basis for a majority of absolute and relative judgment tasks in perception and cognition, often provide the fundamental data for exercises in scaling, and, most importantly for present purposes, provide a means of estimating multiple points on a single detection or discrimination function. That function is often called an isosensitivity function, or receiveroperating characteristic, and the points along it represent equivalent discrimination but different underlying decision criteria. Isosensitivity functions play a prominent role in theoretical development, particularly in research on recognition memory, so it is important to examine closely the assumptions that underlie the translation between the shape and location of the isosensitivity function and the nature of the evidence that yields that function. Here we consider the contrasting implications of the standard view of the decision process being static and nonvariable, as in classical Theory of Signal Detection (TSD; Green &
Journal of Memory and Language, Aug 1, 2017
Successful teaching, effective advertising, and happy interpersonal relationships depend upon acc... more Successful teaching, effective advertising, and happy interpersonal relationships depend upon accurately anticipating what others will remember. Across three experiments, we tested how precisely subjects judged the mnemonic effectiveness of cues for supporting other subjects' episodic memories. Some subjects generated cue-target word pairs and made judgments of learning (JOLs) for these word pairs while other subjects studied the pairs and made JOLs. Across all three experiments, subjects' JOLs for others were more accurate than chance, but less accurate than subjects' JOLs for themselves. Further, JOLs for others were similarly accurate across cues that subjects generated for others and cues that subjects read but did not themselves generate. Idiosyncratic cue generation processes impacted subjects' JOLs for others; however, this bias was not the primary reason for the inaccuracy of JOLs for others. Rather, our results suggest that the accuracy of judgments about others' memories suffers because people do not have access to the personal idiosyncrasies of others' encoding and processing.
Psychology and Aging, 2012
Accurate metacognitive knowledge is vital for optimal performance in self-regulated learning. Yet... more Accurate metacognitive knowledge is vital for optimal performance in self-regulated learning. Yet older adults have deficiencies in implementing effective learning strategies and knowledge updating, and consequently may not learn as effectively from task experience as younger adults. Here we assess the ability of older adults to update metacognitive knowledge about the effects of word frequency on recognition. Young adults have been shown to correct their misconceptions through experience with the task, but the greater difficulty older adults have with knowledge updating makes it unclear whether task experience will be sufficient for older adults. The performance of older adults in this experiment qualitatively replicates the results of a comparison group of younger subjects, indicating that both groups are able to correct their metacognitive knowledge through task experience. Older adults seem to possess more effective and flexible metacognition than sometimes suggested. Keywords metacognition; monitoring; knowledge updating; word frequency; judgments of learning The sophisticated use of metacognitive strategies is critical to being an effective learner (Finley, Tullis, & Benjamin, 2009). However, having control over learning is only effective when metacognitive judgments are accurate (Theide, Anderson, & Therriault, 2003; Tullis & Benjamin, 2011). Because learners' ideas about the memorability of varying materials or the effectiveness of varying study regimens are often incorrect, being able to learn from one's mistakes is particularly important. Correcting inappropriate metacognitive knowledge through direct task experience is especially important for older adults, who must adapt to changing environments and who may be particularly naïve about the differential effectiveness of many learning strategies (Brigham & Pressley, 1988; Hertzog & Hultsch, 2000). The goal of the present experiment is to evaluate whether task experience can help older adults correct a particular misconception about the effects of word frequency on recognition in a multiple study-test paradigm. This paradigm has been shown to lead younger adults to correctly appreciate the effects of word frequency, so those results can
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Oct 1, 2015
The ability to take a different perspective is central to a tremendous variety of higher level co... more The ability to take a different perspective is central to a tremendous variety of higher level cognitive skills. To communicate effectively, we must adopt the perspective of another person both while speaking and listening. To ensure the successful retrieval of critical information in the future, we must adopt the perspective of our own future self and construct cues that will survive the passage of time. Here we explore the cognitive underpinnings of perspective-taking across a set of tasks that involve communication and memory, with an eye toward evaluating the proposal that perspective-taking is domain-general (e.g., Wardlow, 2013). We measured participants' perspective-taking ability in a language production task, a language comprehension task, and a memory task in which people generated their own cues for the future. Surprisingly, there was little variance common to the 3 tasks, a result that suggests that perspective-taking is not domain-general. Performance in the language production task was predicted by a measure of working memory, whereas performance in the cue-generation memory task was predicted by a combination of working memory and long-term memory measures. These results indicate that perspective-taking relies on differing cognitive capacities in different situations.
Memory & Cognition, Apr 8, 2014
People often recognize same-race faces better than other-race faces. This cross-race effect (CRE)... more People often recognize same-race faces better than other-race faces. This cross-race effect (CRE) has been proposed to arise in part because learners devote fewer cognitive resources to encode faces of social out-groups. In three experiments, we evaluated whether learners' other-race mnemonic deficits are due to "cognitive disregard" during study and whether this disregard is under metacognitive control. Learners studied each face either for as long as they wanted (the self-paced condition) or for the average time taken by a self-paced learner (the fixed-rate condition). Self-paced learners allocated equal amounts of study time to same-race and other-race faces, and having control over study time did not change the size of the CRE. In the second and third experiments, both self-paced and fixed-rate learners were given instructions to "individuate" other-race faces. Individuation instructions caused self-paced learners to allocate more study time to other-race faces, but this did not significantly reduce the size of the CRE, even for learners who reported extensive contact with other races. We propose that the differential processing that people apply to faces of different races and the subsequent other-race mnemonic deficit are not due to learners' strategic cognitive disregard of other-race faces.
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, May 15, 2012
Allowing young learners to exert metacognitive control over learning often improves memory perfor... more Allowing young learners to exert metacognitive control over learning often improves memory performance; however, little research has examined the consequences of giving older adults control over learning. In this study, younger and older adults studied word pairs before choosing half of the word pairs for restudy. Learners either restudied the items they chose (in the honor condition) or the items they did not choose (the
Journal of Memory and Language, Feb 1, 2011
Metacognitive monitoring and control must be accurate and efficient in order to allow self-guided... more Metacognitive monitoring and control must be accurate and efficient in order to allow self-guided learners to improve their performance. Yet few examples exist in which allowing learners to control learning produces higher levels of performance than restricting learners' control. Here we investigate the consequences of allowing learners to self-pace study of a list of words on later recognition, and show that learners with control of study-time allocation significantly outperformed subjects with no control, even when the total study time was equated between groups (Experiments 1 and 2). The self-pacing group also outperformed a group for which study time was automatically allocated as a function of normative item difficulty (Experiment 2). The advantage of self-pacing was apparent only in subjects who utilized a discrepancy reduction strategy-that is, who allocated more study time to normatively difficult items. Self-pacing can improve memory performance, but only when appropriate allocation strategies are used.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, May 3, 2021
Students frequently generate mnemonic cues to help them remember difficult or abstract informatio... more Students frequently generate mnemonic cues to help them remember difficult or abstract information (Tullis & Maddox, Metacognition and Learning, 2020, 15, 129). Self-generated mnemonics have the potential to be particularly effective means of remembering target information because they can transform abstract information into meaningful units, connect information to existing schema, and create distinct retrieval routes to the targets. Across five experiments, we compared the effectiveness of self-generated mnemonics to mnemonics generated by others for remembering chemistry information. Generating one's own mnemonics consistently boosted recall for both the chemistry content and the mnemonic itself. However, experimentally boosting recall of mnemonics through retrieval practice did not affect recall of associated chemistry content. These results indicate that improved recall of chemistry content is not caused by better recall of the mnemonic itself; rather, generating a mnemonic involves deep and effortful processing of chemistry content that boosts recall more than reading someone else's mnemonic. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).
Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, Dec 1, 2016
Comparison and reminding have both been shown to support learning and transfer. Comparison is tho... more Comparison and reminding have both been shown to support learning and transfer. Comparison is thought to support transfer because it allows learners to disregard non-matching features of superficially different episodes in order to abstract the essential structure of concepts. Remindings promote memory for the individual episodes and generalization because they prompt learners to retrieve earlier episodes during the encoding of later related episodes and to compare across episodes. Across three experiments, we compared the consequences of comparison and reminding on memory and transfer. Participants studied a sequence of related, but superficially different, proverb pairs. In the comparison condition, participants saw proverb pairs presented together and compared their meaning. In the reminding condition, participants viewed proverbs one at a time and retrieved any prior studied proverb that shared the same deep meaning as the current proverb. Experiment 1 revealed that participants in the reminding condition recalled more proverbs than those in the comparison condition. Experiment 2 showed that the mnemonic benefits of reminding persisted over a one-week retention interval. Finally, in Experiment 3, we examined the ability of participants to generalize their remembered information to new items in a task that required participants to identify unstudied proverbs that shared the same meaning as studied proverbs. Comparison led to worse discrimination between proverbs related to studied proverbs and proverbs unrelated to studied proverbs than reminding. Reminding supported better memory for individual instances and transfer to new situations than comparison.
Frontiers in Education, Mar 6, 2017
Learners often struggle to grasp the important, central principles of complex systems, which desc... more Learners often struggle to grasp the important, central principles of complex systems, which describe how interactions between individual agents can produce complex, aggregate-level patterns. Learners have even more difficulty transferring their understanding of these principles across superficially dissimilar instantiations of the principles. Here, we provide evidence that teaching high school students an agent-based modeling language can enable students to apply complex system principles across superficially different domains. We measured student performance on a complex systems assessment before and after 1 week training in how to program models using NetLogo (Wilensky, 1999a). Instruction in NetLogo helped two classes of high school students apply complex systems principles to a broad array of phenomena not previously encountered. We argue that teaching an agent-based computational modeling language effectively combines the benefits of explicitly defining the abstract principles underlying agent-level interactions with the advantages of concretely grounding knowledge through interactions with agent-based models.
Policy insights from the behavioral and brain sciences, Aug 21, 2018
Generating memory cues can expand memory abilities and support learning across a broad range of d... more Generating memory cues can expand memory abilities and support learning across a broad range of domains. Using technology can help. Key Points • • Self-generated memory cues can help students, trainees, older adults, and others remember difficult information, even more than generic memory cues. • • Self-generated memory cues elaborate information in meaningful and distinct ways. • • Instructions, the importance of the information, and the encoding context change the kind of cues that people generate. • • Technology can be harnessed to improve self-generated cues. • • Memory cues can benefit memory at school, in training, and during older ages.
Memory & Cognition, Mar 17, 2015
The successful use of memory requires us to be sensitive to the cues that will be present during ... more The successful use of memory requires us to be sensitive to the cues that will be present during retrieval. In many situations, we have some control over the external cues that we will encounter. For instance, learners create shopping lists at home to help remember what items to later buy at the grocery store, and they generate computer file names to help remember the contents of those files. Generating cues in the service of later cognitive goals is a complex task that lies at the intersection of metacognition, communication, and memory. In this series of experiments, we investigated how and how well learners generate external mnemonic cues. Across 5 experiments, learners generated a cue for each target word in a to-be-remembered list and received these cues during a later cued recall test. Learners flexibly generated cues in response to different instructional demands and study list compositions. When generating mnemonic cues, as compared to descriptions of target items, learners produced cues that were more distinct than mere descriptions and consequently elicited greater cued recall performance than those descriptions. When learners were aware of competing targets in the study list, they generated mnemonic cues with smaller cue-to-target associative strength but that were even more distinct. These adaptations led to fewer confusions among competing targets and enhanced cued recall performance. These results provide another example of the metacognitively sophisticated tactics that learners use to effectively support future retrieval.
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Papers by Jonathan Tullis