retrieval practice and restudy with pleasantness ratings on cued recall
Verde (2013) reported that not only noncompetitive retrieval practice but also re-exposure supplemented with best category judgments or pleasantness ratings can reduce recall of the not re-exposed items. The goal of Experiment 2a was to replicate this finding.
In the present Experiments 2a and 2b, re-exposure supplemented with pleasantness ratings was employed, because the impaired recall of the unpracticed items in Verde’s study was numerically higher (14%) with this practice format relative to both the (competitive) retrieval practice condition (9%) and the category-judgment task (9%). Analogous to Experiment 1a, the effects of (competitive) retrieval practice were directly compared with the effects of this re-exposure condition, analyzing how the two types of practice affected later recall performance of practiced and unpracticed items. On the basis of Verde’s previous study, the expectation arose that RIF would be observed after (competitive) retrieval practice and RIF-like forgetting after re-exposure supplemented with pleasantness ratings.
Methods
Participants. Thirty-six students of Regensburg University took part in the experiment (M = 22.4 years, range = 18-40 years, 26 female). All subjects spoke German as native language and received monetary reward for their participation.
Materials. The same material was employed as in the previous study by Dobler and B¨auml (2013). Nine categories (musical instruments, insects, trees, fruits, furniture, spices, clothing, tools, four-legged animals) with six study items as well as three categories (gems, alcoholic
Experiments 1-3
68 How do you feel about this item?1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7
Figure 4. Procedure and conditions employed in Experiments 2a and 2b. (a) Study and practice phases of Experiments 2a and 2b: Participants studied a list of categorized items. In the practice phase, participants practiced some items by retrieving the exemplar (competitive retrieval practice) and some items by rating the item’s pleasantness given the intact word pair (re-exposure and rating). (b) Test phase: In Experiment 2a, the category label and the exemplar’s initial letter were provided and participants were asked to recall the exemplar (cued recall). In Experiment 2b, all studied exemplars and lures were provided and participants were asked to make old/new judgments (item recognition).
drinks, sanitary articles) with two items each serving as buffer items were drawn from German published word norms (Mannhaupt, 1983) to create the study list. The German translations of the category names of the nine experimental categories consisted of a single word. The two most frequent exemplars of each category were excluded. Practiced and unpracticed items were of medium to high frequency (median = 10.5). Again, studied items
Experiments 1-3
69within each category had a unique first letter.
Design and Procedure. The experiment had a 2 × 3 design with the within-subject factors of practice type (competitive retrieval, re-exposure) and item type (practiced, unpracticed, control). The procedure was largely identical to Experiment 1a and differed only in the practice phase (see Figure 4). In the (competitive) retrieval condition, the category label and the first letter of the to-be-retrieved item were provided and participants were asked to retrieve the corresponding item (e.g., insect - t ); following Verde (2013), no feedback was provided. In the re-exposure condition, some of the original category-exemplar pairs were re-exposed and subjects were asked to judge the pleasantness of the presented exemplars on a 7-point scale (1 = not pleasant at all, 7 = very pleasant). Like in Experiments 1a and 1b, in each practice condition, items were practiced twice, in two successive practice cycles. For each practice type, three types of items were generated:
practiced items, i.e., retrieval practiced (crp+) and re-exposed and rated (re+) items; unpracticed items of practiced categories (crp-, re-); and control items of unpracticed categories (c+, c-). Categories were counterbalanced between subjects to be either retrieval practiced, re-exposed and rated, or not practiced at all. The study list was arranged by blocked randomization as described in Experiment 1a.
Results
Practice Phase. In the competitive retrieval condition, participants correctly retrieved 67.0% (SD = 0.20) of the items on the first practice cycle and 68.7% (SD = 0.20) of the items in total.
Recall Test. Percentages of correctly recalled practiced and unpracticed items in the retrieval practice and re-exposure conditions and of the corresponding control items are depicted in Figures 5a and 5b. Regarding the beneficial effects of practice, recall rates mounted up to 68.2% (SD = 0.21) for the crp+ items, 70.4% (SD = 0.18) for the re+ items, and 49.7%
Experiments 1-3
70Figure 5. Results of Experiment 2a. Mean recall rates are shown as a function of item type. Error bars represent standard errors. (a) Recall percentages for competitively retrieval practiced items (crp+), re-exposed and rated items (re+), and control items (c+). (b) Recall percentages for unpracticed items of competitively retrieval practiced categories (crp-), unpracticed items of re-exposed and rated categories (re-), and control items (c-).
(SD = 0.22) for the c+ items. Recall levels differed significantly across item type, F (2, 70) = 20.934, M SE = 0.022, p < .001, η2 = 0.374. Planned comparisons showed significant recall enhancement for both crp+ and re+
items when compared to c+ items, t(35) = 4.965, p < .001, d = 0.860, and t(35) = 5.462, p < .001, d = 1.030. Recall performance of crp+ and re+ items did not differ reliably, t(35) < 1. Thus, as expected, both types of practice boosted recall of practiced items at test. Intrusion rates were .05 (SD = 0.08) for the crp+ items, .06 (SD = 0.08) for the re+ items, and .05 (SD = 0.08) for the c+ items, and did not differ across item type, F (2, 70) < 1.
Regarding the detrimental effects of practice, recall rates of 61.1% (SD = 0.20) for the crp- items, 62.7% (SD = 0.19) for the re- items, and 71.3% (SD = 0.15) for the c- items were observed. Recall rates varied across item type, F (2, 70) = 5.504, M SE = 0.020, p = .006, η2 = 0.234. Planned comparisons revealed significant forgetting of crp- relative to c- items, t(35) = 3.274, p = .002, d = 0.577, and significant forgetting of re- relative to c- items, t(35) =
Experiments 1-3
71−3.682, p = .001, d = 0.502. The numerical difference between crp- and re-items was not significant, t(35) < 1. Intrusion rates were .08 (SD = 0.06) for the crp- items, .10 (SD = 0.09) for the re- items, and .07 (SD = 0.07) for the c- items, and did not differ across item type, F (2, 70) = 1.170, M SE = 0.007, p = .317, η2 = 0.032.
Discussion
The results demonstrate that both (competitive) retrieval practice and re-exposure with pleasantness ratings enhanced recall of the practiced items (crp+, re+) but reduced recall of the unpracticed items (crp-, re-). The finding of RIF after both practice conditions replicates the previous recall results by Verde (2013) and supports the equivalence assumption of the blocking account.
In Experiment 2b, the same procedure was employed as in Experiment 2a in order to investigate whether the findings generalize to item recognition testing or whether, like in Experiments 1a and 1b, they do not.