Effects of elaborate feedback during practice tests: Costs and benefits of retrieval prompts.

This study explores the effect of feedback with hints on students' recall of words. In three classroom experiments, high school students individually practiced vocabulary words through computerized retrieval practice with either standard show-answer feedback (display of answer) or hints feedback after incorrect responses. Hints feedback gave students a second chance to find the correct response using orthographic (Experiment 1), mnemonic (Experiment 2), or cross-language hints (Experiment 3). During practice, hints led to a shift of practice time from further repetitions to longer feedback processing but did not reduce (repeated) errors. There was no effect of feedback on later recall except when the hints from practice were also available on the test, indicating limited transfer of practice with hints to later recall without hints (in Experiments 1 and 2). Overall, hints feedback was not preferable over show-answer feedback. The common notion that hints are beneficial may not hold when the total practice time is limited. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Two visual targets for the price of one? Pupil dilation shows reduced mental effort through temporal integration.

In dynamic sensory environments, successive stimuli may be combined perceptually and represented as a single, comprehensive event by means of temporal integration. Such perceptual segmentation across time is intuitively plausible. However, the possible costs and benefits of temporal integration in perception remain underspecified. In the present study pupil dilation was analyzed as a measure of mental effort. Observers viewed either one or two successive targets amidst distractors in rapid serial visual presentation, which they were asked to identify. Pupil dilation was examined dependent on participants' report: dilation associated with the report of a single target, of two targets, and of an integrated percept consisting of the features of both targets. There was a clear distinction between dilation observed for single-target reports and integrations on the one side, and two-target reports on the other. Regardless of report order, two-target reports produced increased pupil dilation, reflecting increased mental effort. The results thus suggested that temporal integration reduces mental effort and may thereby facilitate perceptual processing.

How to assess the existence of competing strategies in cognitive tasks: a primer on the fixed-point property.

When multiple strategies can be used to solve a type of problem, the observed response time distributions are often mixtures of multiple underlying base distributions each representing one of these strategies. For the case of two possible strategies, the observed response time distributions obey the fixed-point property. That is, there exists one reaction time that has the same probability of being observed irrespective of the actual mixture proportion of each strategy. In this paper we discuss how to compute this fixed-point, and how to statistically assess the probability that indeed the observed response times are generated by two competing strategies. Accompanying this paper is a free R package that can be used to compute and test the presence or absence of the fixed-point property in response time data, allowing for easy to use tests of strategic behavior.