MA, Kent State University, 2018, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of Psychological Sciences

Why does making judgments of learning (JOLs) influence subsequent memory, and when learners make JOLs for some items but not others, how is recall performance affected? To answer these questions, participants studied related and unrelated word pairs and made JOLs for half. Pair type was either randomly intermixed within a list (Experiment 1) or blocked (Experiment 2). I evaluated two hypotheses. The changed-goal hypothesis, proposed by Mitchum, Kelley, and Fox (J Exp Psychol Gen, 2016), states that making JOLs leads learners to notice differences in item difficulty and allocate more resources to learning easier pairs, ultimately leading to higher recall for easier (i.e., related) pairs and impaired recall for more difficult (i.e., unrelated) pairs. In contrast, the positive-reactivity hypothesis predicts increased recall performance for both related and unrelated pairs. As predicted by the positive-reactivity hypothesis, recall performance was higher for pairs that were judged versus not judged on both a mixed and blocked list of related and unrelated pairs. In Experiment 3, I evaluated one proximal mechanism for increased performance for judged pairs: The use of more effective encoding strategies during acquisition. Making JOLs did not influence strategy use, which suggests that the benefit of making JOLs on memory performance results from increased attention. These and other findings converge to support the claim that the requirement to monitor learning benefits memory.

Committee: John Dunlosky (Advisor); Maria Zaragoza (Committee Member); Katherine Rawson (Committee Member); William Lechner (Committee Member) Subjects: Cognitive Psychology; Psychology

Master of Arts, University of Toledo, 2010, Psychology

The role of interhemispheric interaction is confirmed by past studies on handedness that have shown a mixed handed advantage in recalling episodic memories. The current study aimed to investigate whether a similar pattern exists for prospective memory (memory for future intentions). The study was performed on undergraduate participants of the University of Toledo (N = 143) and incorporated cognitive tests to measure prospective memory (Memory for Intentions Screening Test), working memory (Digit span) and executive function performance (Pair Cancellation Task) and a meta memory questionnaire on one's assessment of everyday memory (Everyday Memory Questionnaire). Handedness differences were not observed for prospective memory, although mean scores were nominally higher for mixed-handers. However, a significant female advantage was present. Further analyses showed a) positive associations between working and prospective memories and b) executive functioning was a significant predictor for prospective memory, both of these findings which were specific to females only. Finally, a concordance between meta memory and objective prospective memory scores was observed in females only. Results are discussed in the light of past research.

Committee: Stephen Christman (Committee Chair); John. D. Jasper (Committee Member); Kamala London (Committee Member) Subjects: Cognitive Psychology

PHD, Kent State University, 2008, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of Psychological Sciences

This study investigated the relationship between cue diagnosticity and judgment accuracy for judgments of text learning in three experiments. Experiment 1 examined the influence of processing matches between a "practice" test (which also served as a measure of the cue) and a criterion test. Results reported that the type of criterion test influenced cue diagnosticity but not judgment accuracy. Experiment 2 extended these results by investigating the influence of the lag between the study session and the judgment session on cue diagnosticity and judgment accuracy. Results from Experiment 2 reported statistically significant differences for both cue diagnosticity and judgment accuracy. In particular, higher levels of cue diagnosticity were associated with higher levels of judgment accuracy. Experiment 3 investigated the influence of the lag between the trial on which cues were measured and the time at which the final criterion test occurred. Experiment 3 replicated results reported in Experiment 2.

Committee: John Dunlosky PhD (Committee Chair) Subjects: Psychotherapy