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the discrepancy reduction model, learners used the more effective scheduling strat-
egy (spacing) on less difficult items. However, Benjamin and Bird (2006) found the
opposite effect when they increased initial presentation time to 5 s and added the
constraints that all pairs be restudied, half massed and half spaced. Toppino, Cohen,
Davis, and Moors (2009) sought to elucidate these discrepant findings by manipu-
lating initial presentation time (1 vs. 5 s). They found that learners tended to space
harder pairs when given more time and vice versa when given less time. The pref-
erence for massed re-study in the 1 s condition appeared to arise from inadequate
time to fully perceive the pair, which happened more often for pairs consisting of
longer and lower-frequency words (i.e., the harder pairs). When given enough time
for initial encoding, learners indeed employ effective scheduling for more difficult
material.
Selection of Items for Study and Re-study
Learners make sensible decisions about which items they should re-study (or
drop from studying), but are overly optimistic about their final level of mem-
ory performance. Kornell and Metcalfe (2006) gave learners a list of general
knowledge facts to study once. Learners then decided which half of the items
they needed to re-study, and these decisions were either honored (learners re-
studied the items they selected) or dishonored (learners studied the items they
did not choose). Honoring learners' choices about which items to re-study led to
greater final test performance than did dishonoring those choices. This demon-
strates that learners can make reasonable choices about which items to re-study
and that giving learners control over their own study can improve memory
performance.
However, giving learners more control over item selection does not always lead
to better performance. Kornell and Bjork (2008) and Atkinson (1972) showed that
learners with less control over which items they re-studied outperformed those with
more control. In the study by Kornell and Bjork, some learners were allowed to drop
English-Swahili word pairs from their study routine, while others had no choice but
to re-study the entire list of pairs. Allowing learners to drop items from their study
routine generally hurt performance (compared to making the learners re-study the
entire list of items) on a final cued recall test, both immediately and at 1 week
delay, even when the groups were given the same overall amount of study time. In
combination with the Kornell and Metcalfe study (2006), this shows that learners are
effective at choosing which items they need to re-study, but overly optimistic about
their ability to recall information later. Atkinson evaluated memory performance
under conditions in which item selection was controlled by learners, determined
randomly, or determined by an experimenter-designed adaptive algorithm. He found
that performance by the self-controlled group was higher than the random group, but
lower than the algorithm group. Thus, learners choose items for re-study effectively
to some extent but less than optimally.
