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When eyewitnesses see a crime, they often do so under physiological stress. Research suggests that stress disrupts memory accuracy, but less is known about whether stress impacts the relationship between confidence and accuracy. Whereas researchers generally agree that pristine encoding and retrieval conditions lead to a strong relationship between the two (Wixted & Wells, 2017), how violations of pristine conditions affect the relationship is unclear. In two experiments, participants encoded faces either under physiological stress (via a cold pressor task) or under control conditions. Participants were later given a recognition memory test for the faces and provided confidence judgments in their old/new decisions. As expected, stress impaired face recognition accuracy. However, we observed similar confidence–accuracy relationships regardless of stress condition. Though participants in the stress condition were less accurate in their identifications overall, they had the metacognitive awareness to scale back their confidence judgments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tran et al. (2015) evaluated whether engaging in practice testing versus restudy promotes transfer and concluded that testing does not enhance performance on a deductive reasoning task. The current research further evaluated Tran et al. (2015) and an alternative explanation for the observed effect—namely, that testing did not enhance memory for the information required to complete the deductive reasoning task. Learners studied premises from four scenarios and engaged in testing or restudy during practice. Following practice, learners completed a multiple-choice test that required them to deductively reason from premises. Results replicate Tran et al. (2015) by demonstrating that fill-in-the-blank testing does not promote transfer on a deductive reasoning task. Results also provide evidence suggesting that deductive reasoning depends on complete memory for requisite pieces of information and that testing effects on deductive reasoning are more likely to obtain under conditions that yield a memory advantage for testing versus restudy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although tests typically improve long-term retention, recent research suggests that certain types of tests may disrupt memory, referred to as the negative testing effect. According to one explanatory framework, this detrimental effect on memory results from tests disrupting organizational processing, which hinders the ability to make associations between items. From an educational perspective, these outcomes are concerning because they suggest contexts in which taking a test may impair subsequent retention. However, no research has explored whether the negative testing effect extends to more educational designs and materials. The goal of the current research was twofold: investigate the replicability of the negative testing effect by examining the original demonstration with a novel participant population and explore whether such organizational disruptions generalize to more ecologically valid materials. Outcomes establish the replicability of the negative testing effect and provide evidence that the detrimental effects of testing may not extend to educational material. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]