Minear Meredith, Coane Jennifer H, Boland Sarah C, Cooney Leah H, Albat Marissa
Department of Psychology, University of Wyoming.
Department of Psychology, Colby College.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2018 Sep;44(9):1474-1486. doi: 10.1037/xlm0000486. Epub 2018 Apr 12.
The authors examined whether individual differences in fluid intelligence (gF) modulate the testing effect. Participants studied Swahili-English word pairs and repeatedly studied half the pairs or attempted retrieval, with feedback, for the remaining half. Word pairs were easy or difficult to learn. Overall, participants showed a benefit of testing over restudy. However, almost 1/3 of the sample had a negative testing effect and benefitted more from restudy than testing, as well as performing better overall. These individuals self-reported less use of shallower encoding strategies than positive testing effect participants but did not differ in other dimensions. For individuals with a positive testing effect, difficulty had differential effects on participants who scored high or low on a measure of gF, with high gF participants showing larger testing effects for difficult over easy items, whereas low gF participants showed the opposite. Working memory performance was not related to the magnitude of the testing effect; however, vocabulary knowledge revealed a similar pattern as gF, with higher vocabulary associated with a testing effect for difficult but not easy items. This suggests that the benefit of retrieval practice varies with item difficulty and participant abilities. Thus, recommendations to engage in retrieval practice should take into consideration the interactive effects of to-be-learned materials and individual differences in the learners. (PsycINFO Database Record
作者们研究了流体智力（gF）的个体差异是否会调节测试效应。参与者学习斯瓦希里语-英语单词对，对其中一半的单词对进行反复学习，对另一半则在有反馈的情况下尝试回忆。单词对的学习难度有易有难。总体而言，参与者表现出测试比重新学习更有优势。然而，近三分之一的样本出现了负测试效应，从重新学习中比从测试中获益更多，并且总体表现也更好。这些人自我报告称，与有正测试效应的参与者相比，他们较少使用较浅层次的编码策略，但在其他方面没有差异。对于有正测试效应的个体，难度对在gF测量中得分高或低的参与者有不同影响，gF得分高的参与者在难的项目上比易的项目上表现出更大的测试效应，而gF得分低的参与者则相反。工作记忆表现与测试效应的大小无关；然而，词汇知识呈现出与gF相似的模式，较高的词汇量与难的但非易的项目的测试效应相关。这表明检索练习的益处会因项目难度和参与者能力而有所不同。因此，关于进行检索练习的建议应考虑待学习材料的交互作用以及学习者的个体差异。（PsycINFO数据库记录）
