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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, ((c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).)

Ophir, Nass, and Wagner (Proceedings of the National Association of Sciences 106:15583-15587, 2009) reported that individuals who routinely engage in multiple forms of media use are actually worse at multitasking, possibly due to difficulties in ignoring irrelevant stimuli, from both external sources and internal representations in memory. Using the media multitasking index (MMI) developed by Ophir et al., we identified heavy media multitaskers (HMMs) and light media multitaskers (LMMs) and tested them on measures of attention, working memory, task switching, and fluid intelligence, as well as self-reported impulsivity and self-control. We found that people who reported engaging in heavy amounts of media multitasking reported being more impulsive and performed more poorly on measures of fluid intelligence than did those who did not frequently engage in media multitasking. However, we could find no evidence to support the contention that HMMs are worse in a multitasking situation such as task switching or that they show any deficits in dealing with irrelevant or distracting information, as compared with LMMs.