Vered Halamish

Bar Ilan University | BIU · School of Education

Predicting what we will remember and forget is crucial for daily functioning. We were interested in whether evaluating something as likely to be remembered or forgotten leads to enhanced memory for both forms of information relative to information that was not judged for memorability. We presented participants with lists of words to remember for a...

Research has observed that monitoring one's own learning modifies memory for some materials but not for others. Specifically, making judgments of learning (JOLs) while learning word pairs improves subsequent cued-recall memory performance for related word pairs but not for unrelated word pairs. Theories that have attempted to explain this pattern o...

There is an ongoing transition in education from paper-based learning and testing to digital learning and testing. The purpose of the present research was to examine whether the relative effectiveness of digital and paper-based learning depends on the medium of testing in the context of foreign-language vocabulary learning. In a controlled experime...

Rememberers are often motivated to remember certain pieces of information more than they are motivated to remember other pieces. The literature suggests that this motivation results in selective remembering of valuable information and that it yields selective processing of this valuable information during encoding. However, the question of whether...

Learners are more likely to remember what they study if they are motivated to do so. Such motivation can be externally driven by prospective rewards, but also intrinsically driven by curiosity. The present research focused on the role of curiosity during intentional learning. We examined the potential mnemonic benefit of curiosity, whether this ben...

On-screen reading is becoming increasingly prevalent in educational settings, and children are now are expected to comprehend texts that they read on screens. However, research suggests that reading on screen impairs comprehension compared to reading on paper. Furthermore, this medium effect is not reflected in adults' metacomprehension judgments,...

Research in cognitive psychology has suggested that difficulties are often desirable for learning: learning strategies that create difficulties for learners during practice often produce durable learning. Prominent examples of effective learning strategies that introduce desirable difficulties are testing as a means of learning, spacing study sessi...

Recently, there has been a growing interest in the effect of perceptual features of learning materials on adults’ memory and metamemory. Previous studies consistently have found that adults use font size as a cue when monitoring their learning, judging that they will remember large font size words better than small font size words. Most studies hav...

Presenting information in a perceptually degraded format sometimes enhances learning outcomes. However, earlier studies in which words were presented in large or small fonts in a paradigm that also involved item-by-item judgments of learning (JOLs) consistently yielded no mnemonic benefit of small fonts. Can small font size enhance memory under hit...

When facing a decision, people look for relevant information to guide their choice. But how much information do they seek to obtain? Based on Construal Level Theory, we predicted that psychological distance from a decision would make participants seek more information prior to making a decision. Five experiments supported this prediction. When faci...

Evaluating alternatives and comparing them to each other are integral to decision-making. In addition, however, decision makers may adopt a view that goes beyond choice and make inferences about the entire set of alternatives, about the dimensions that are relevant in similar decisions, and about the range of values on a specific dimension. We exam...

This study examined age-related differences in the ability to judge one's vocabulary. Young, middle-age, and older adults completed a multiple-choice test of vocabulary, judged their confidence in each answer, and estimated their overall performance. Older adults performed better and were more confident in their knowledge than were the other 2 grou...

A frequent procedure used to study how individuals monitor their own learning is to collect judgments of learning (JOLs) during acquisition, considered to be important, in part, because such judgments are assumed to guide how individuals allocate their future learning resources. In such research, however, a tacit assumption is frequently made: Name...

Research on reading development has focused on the linguistic, cognitive, and recently, metacognitive skills children must master in order to learn to read. Less focus has been devoted to how the text itself, namely the perceptual features of the words, affects children's learning and comprehension. In this study, we manipulated perceptual properti...

Metamemory judgments may rely on 2 bases of information: subjective experience and abstract theories about memory. On the basis of construal level theory, we predicted that psychological distance and construal level (i.e., concrete vs. abstract thinking) would have a qualitative impact on the relative reliance on these 2 bases: When considering lea...

Despite the clear long-term benefits of spaced practice, students and teachers often choose massed practice. Whether learners actually fail to appreciate the benefits of spacing is, however, open to question. Early studies (e.g., Zechmeister & Shaughnessy, 1980) found that participants' judgments of learning were higher after massed than after spac...

Research on the strategic regulation of memory accuracy has focused primarily on monitoring and control processes used to edit out incorrect information after it is retrieved (back-end control). Recent studies, however, suggest that rememberers also enhance accuracy by preventing the retrieval of incorrect information in the first place (front-end...

Tests, as learning events, can enhance subsequent recall more than do additional study opportunities, even without feedback. Such advantages of testing tend to appear, however, only at long retention intervals and/or when criterion tests stress recall, rather than recognition, processes. We propose that the interaction of the benefits of testing ve...

The present study examined whether there are age-related differences in the ability to accurately monitor forgetting. Young and older adults studied a mixed list of categorized words, and later recalled items when cued with each category. They then estimated the number of additional items that they did not recall-a form of monitoring one's forgetti...

Prospect theory [Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1992). Advances in prospect theory: Cumulative representation of uncertainty. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 5, 297-323] proposes that uncertainty reduces the perceived intensity of losses slightly less than it reduces the perceived intensity of gains. We examined whether this difference would be more...

This study explored the values held by nursing students attending a baccalaureate program. Our aim was to determine whether nursing students' values change after being exposed to educators as well as mentors and ethics education and after experiencing today's challenging work environment, with an emphasis on the organizational domain of the student...

To identify conflict mode choices of head nurses in general hospitals and examine the relationship between leadership style, choice of strategy in handling conflicts and demographic characteristics. Nurse managers deal with conflicts daily. The choice of conflict management mode is associated with managerial effectiveness. The ability to creatively...