Self control of when and how much to test face–name pairs in a novel spaced retrieval paradigm: An examination of age-related differences

ABSTRACT

Although the mnemonic benefit of spaced retrieval is well established, the way in which participants naturally space their own retrieval is relatively unexplored. To examine this question, a novel experimental paradigm was developed in which young and healthy older adults were given control over the frequency and timing of retrieval practice in the context of an ongoing reading task. Results showed that both age groups naturally expanded the intervals of their retrieval practice. When instructed, younger adults but not older adults were better able to employ equal spaced retrieval during retrieval practice. However, even under equal spaced retrieval instructions, young adults included an early retrieval attempt prior to equally spacing their retrieval. Although memory performance was equivalent, secondary task performance was reduced in the experimenter-instructed condition compared with the participant-selected condition. The results overall indicate that both younger and older participants naturally monitor their memory and efficiently use testing to titrate the number and timing of retrieval attempts used during the acquisition phase.

Keywords:

• Memory
• Aging
• Testing effect
• Retrieval
• Metacognition

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by NIA Training Grant AG00030, and PO1 AGO3991. Portions of this research were previously presented at Psychonomics, 2010, in St. Louis, Missouri. Our thanks to Mitra Haeri, Anchana Dominic and Jonathan Jackson for their assistance with data collection and to Pooja Agarwal and Jes Logan for their assistance in constructing stimuli. We also wish to thank Mary Pyc for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript.

Notes

¹When the analysis included all participants, there was a small, nonsignificant effect of age, t(142) = 0.76, p = .451, such that young adults (M = 3.01 tests) took fewer tests than older adults (M = 3.15 tests).

²For young adults, final delayed test performance replicated the pattern of results obtained on the end of the block test. For older adults, participants who used four tests performed worse than those who used two and three tests which may reflect the poorer memory abilities of this group.

³Because the presentation order for equal-instructed and expanded-instructed blocks was counterbalanced and collapsed, Blocks 2 and 3 in the self-selected condition were also collapsed and compared separately for each of the instruction conditions.

⁴Similar patterns of performance were obtained on the End of Acquisition Phase and Final Test. Thus, we report data from the End of Acquisition Phase. Young adults remembered more than older adults. Older adults who took four tests in the self-selected condition always performed lower than all other older adult groups.

⁵Additionally, a direct comparison of the end of block test performance in the expanded and equal spaced instruction conditions for participants who took four tests (17 young and 19 older adults) revealed a marginal effect of age, p = .057, such that performance was higher for young adults (M = 0.94) than older adults (M = 0.80), and no effect of instruction condition, F(1, 34) = 1.17, p > .29.