Cue generation: how learners flexibly support future retrieval

In a wide variety of situations, learners generate external cues that they can later use to support retrieval from memory. For instance, learners create shopping lists at home to help remember what items to later buy at the grocery store or set kitchen timers to remember to take the brownies out of the oven. In this dissertation, I investigated what types of cues learners generate, how they generate cues, and whether these cues effectively promote retrieval. Across seven experiments, learners generated a cue for each item in a list of to-be-remembered words and received these cues during a later cued recall test. In the first series of experiments (1-2), learners either intentionally generated cues that they knew they would receive during the test or generated descriptions of targets without knowledge that these descriptions would become cues during test. Learners generated different types of cues depending upon the instructions they received. Further, effective cues were more distinctive and had higher cue-to-target associative strength than ineffective cues. In the next set of experiments (3-5), learners either generated cues for themselves or for other learners. Learners effectively tailored their cues to support others’ memory performance by reducing the distinctiveness of the cues and increasing the normative cue-to-target associative strength. Finally, in the third set of experiments (6-7), learners generated cues for triplets of targets, some of which were presented with related words and some of which were presented with unrelated words. When learners were encouraged to notice the relationships among competitors by presenting the three related items concurrently, the confusions among competing targets were reduced and cued recall performance was improved. The results of these experiments reveal that learners use sophisticated tactics to flexibly generate cues across a variety of different situations and, by doing so, effectively support future retrieval