Effects of Error Generation on Episodic Memory among Healthy Younger and Older Adults

Making mistakes during everyday learning is the norm rather than the exception, but its consequences for episodic memory are still unclear. A pedagogically motivated literature among younger adults shows that generating errors at study leads to improvements in memory for correct information (i.e. the error generation effect). By contrast, a clinically motivated literature among older adults suggests that error generation hinders episodic memory and should be avoided. The goal of this dissertation is to bridge these two literatures and uncover the conditions under which errors help or harm memory among healthy younger and older adults. Study 1 showed that relative to avoiding errors, generating errors at study led to increases in target memory when learning from conceptual cues, but decreases in target memory when learning from nonconceptual lexical cues. Moreover, this dissociation was found among both younger and older adults. Study 2 replicated this conceptual error generation benefit and showed that it was not modulated by cue constraint in both age groups (Study 2A), but that it was enhanced among younger adults when errors and targets were strongly relative to weakly related (Study 2B). Finally, Study 3 found that for both age groups, general knowledge errors were more likely to be corrected when they were produced with high relative to low confidence: This `hypercorrection effect' was stronger in younger than older adults when a free recall learning paradigm was used (Study 3A), but this age difference was eliminated when a multiple-choice paradigm was employed (Study 3B). Overall, these results suggest that the conditions yielding positive or negative effects of error generation on episodic memory are similar among younger and older adults: Lexical (i.e., nonconceptual) errors hinder memory, but conceptual errors enhance memory as a function of the amount of semantic processing they afford. These findings are interpreted within a framework of error processing, which posits the role of cognitive control in reducing error interference and enhancing activation of target information.Ph.D