Sara D Davis

University of North Florida | UNF · Department of Psychology

Practicing retrieval is a potent learning enhancer. Theoretical accounts of the testing effect generally suggest that the magnitude of the testing effect is dependent on retrieval practice performance, such that conditions that promote better retrieval practice performance should result in a greater testing effect. Empirical evidence, however, has...

Prior testing can facilitate subsequent learning, a phenomenon termed the forward testing effect (FTE). We examined a metacognitive account of this effect, which proposes that the FTE occurs because retrieval leads to strategy optimizations during later learning. One prediction of this account is that tests that require less retrieval effort (e.g.,...

There is an increasing need in eyewitness identification research to identify factors that not only influence identification accuracy but may also impact the confidence–accuracy (CA) relationship. One such variable that has a notable impact on memory for faces is viewing distance, with faces encoded from a shorter distance remembered better than fa...

Test anxiety is a major concern in education because it causes uncomfortable feelings in test-anxious students and may reduce the validity of exam scores as a measure of learning. As such, brief and cost-effective interventions are necessary to minimize the negative impact of test anxiety on students’ academic performance. In the present experiment...

Interpolated testing can reduce mind-wandering and proactive interference, and improve note-taking. However, recent research using face-name-profession triads, has also shown that interpolated testing can impair new learning (Davis, Chan, & Wilford, 2017). In the current study, we further examined the impact of switching from testing to new learnin...

Do students learn better with material that is perceptually hard to process? While evidence is mixed, recent claims suggest that placing materials in Sans Forgetica, a perceptually difficult-to-process typeface, has positive impacts on student learning. Given the weak evidence for other similar perceptual disfluency effects, we examined the mnemoni...

General Audience Summary Individuals who witness a crime may later be asked to identify an individual and assign a judgment of confidence to their choice. While past research has suggested there may be substantial discrepancies between confidence and accuracy in memory, more recent research has called this into question. Now, researchers of eyewitn...

A growing body of research has shown that retrieval can enhance future learning of new materials. In the present report, we provide a comprehensive review of the literature on this finding, which we term test-potentiated new learning. Our primary objectives were to: 1) produce an integrative review of the existing theoretical explanations, 2) summa...

Practicing retrieval on previously studied materials can potentiate subsequent learning of new materials. In four experiments, we investigated the influence of retention interval and lag on this test-potentiated new learning (TPNL) effect. Participants studied four word lists and either practiced retrieval, restudied, or completed math problems fol...

General Audience Summary New learning must be scaffolded onto previously learned concepts, and some research has shown that recalling previously learned information (i.e., retrieval practice) can aid later learning of new concepts. However, other research has found the opposite effect. Here, we examined when and why retrieval practice can enhance o...

Retrieving studied materials often enhances subsequent learning of new materials (Pastötter & Bäuml, 2014). However, retrieval has also been shown to impair new learning (Finn & Roediger, 2013). In this article, we attempted to determine when retrieval enhances and when it impairs new learning. We argue that testing impairs new learning when one in...

The mechanism responsible for retrieval-induced forgetting has been the subject of rigorous theoretical debate, with some researchers postulating that retrieval-induced forgetting can be explained by interference (J. G .W. Raaijmakers & E. Jakab, 2013) or context reinstatement (T. R. Jonker, P. Seli, & C. M. MacLeod, 2013), whereas others claim tha...

In the present study, we examined the impacts of participant age and confederate age on social memory processes. During a collaborative recall phase, young and older adult participants were exposed to the erroneous memory reports of a young or an older adult confederate. On a subsequent individual recall test, young and older adult participants wer...

In three experiments, participants studied photographs of common household scenes. Following study, participants completed a category-cued recall test without feedback (Exps. 1 and 3), a category-cued recall test with feedback (Exp. 2), or a filler task (no-test condition). Participants then viewed recall tests from fictitious previous participants...