Evan F. Risko’s research while affiliated with University of Waterloo and other places

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Publications (177)


Does expecting external memory support cost recognition memory?
  • Article

January 2025

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9 Reads

Memory & Cognition

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Batul Karimjee

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April E. Pereira

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[...]

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Evan F. Risko

We often use tools and aids to help us achieve our cognitive goals – that is, we often offload to external supports. One such variety of offloading is the use of external memory stores (e.g., phones, computers, notebooks, calendars) to support memory. Recent work aimed at better understanding the consequences of offloading memory on aspects of unaided memory have revealed a clear cost to unaided memory performance when an external memory store is unexpectedly lost, but this work has focused on examining this cost in free-recall paradigms. Using key theoretical differences between recall and recognition, we sought to examine the influences of expecting external memory supports in a recognition memory context across five preregistered experiments, finding evidence for a small cost to unaided recognition memory. We found evidence for a specific cost in recollection (Experiments 2, 3a, and 3b). When testing the effects of expecting external memory support on indices of study effort, there was a reduction to study time which partially mediated the relation between expecting support and memory performance indices, consistent with earlier work using free recall. Individuals did not predict a cost to memory of losing expected support in recognition, contrasting earlier work using free recall.


Altering the playback speed of recorded lectures as a learning technique: Examining student practices, motivations, and beliefs

January 2025

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3 Reads


Numerical Comparison Is Spatial—Except When It Is Not
  • Article
  • Publisher preview available

September 2024

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41 Reads

Journal of Experimental Psychology General

The numerical distance effect (NDE) is an important tool for probing the nature of numerical representation. Across two studies, we assessed the degree to which the NDE relates to one’s performance on spatial tasks to investigate the role of spatial processing in numerical comparison and, by extension, numerical cognition. We administered numerical comparison tasks and a variety of tasks thought to tap into different aspects of spatial processing. Importantly, we administered both the simultaneous comparison task and the comparison to a standard task, given claims that the NDEs that arise in these two tasks are different. In both studies, the NDEs elicited when comparing simultaneously presented numbers were more strongly negatively correlated with an individual’s performance on the spatial tasks than the NDEs elicited when comparing numbers to a standard. The implications of these data for our understanding of numerical comparison tasks and numerical cognition more generally are discussed.

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Productions Need Not Match Study Items to Confer a Production Advantage, But It Helps

March 2024

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25 Reads

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2 Citations

Experimental Psychology

The production effect is the finding that, relative to silent reading, producing information at study (e.g., reading aloud) leads to a benefit in memory. In most studies of this effect, individuals are presented with a set of unique items, and they produce a subset of these items (e.g., they are presented with the to-be-remembered target item TABLE and produce table) such that the production is both unique and representative of the target. Across two preregistered experiments, we examined the influence of a production that is unique but that does not match the target (e.g., producing fence to the target TABLE, producing car to the target TREE, and so on). This kind of production also yielded a significant effect—the mismatching production effect—although it was smaller than the standard production effect (i.e., when productions are both unique and representative of their targets) and was detectable only when targets with standard productions were included in the same study phase (i.e., when the type of production was manipulated within participant). We suggest that target-production matching is an important precursor to the production effect and that the kind of production that brings about a benefit depends on the other productions that are present.




Fig. 1. Bivariate correlations between grandiose and vulnerable narcissism scores and all variables of interest. Error bars indicate 95 % confidence intervals.
Fig. 2. Scatterplots of bivariate relations between grandiose narcissism scores (x-axis) and: 1) bias measures for intelligence and JOLs (top row), and 2) discrimination indexes for intelligence and JOLs (bottom row). Error bands indicate 95 % confidence intervals.
Fig. 3. Partial correlations between grandiose and vulnerable narcissism scores and all variables of interest, controlling for Antagonism (top-right), Agentic Extraversion (top-left), and Neuroticism (bottom). Error bars indicate 95 % confidence intervals.
The metacognitive abilities of narcissists: Individual differences between grandiose and vulnerable subtypes

January 2024

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104 Reads

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1 Citation

Personality and Individual Differences

Understanding individual differences in metacognitive ability is vital to gaining a better understanding of how we think about our own thinking. Past research has shown that individual differences in grandiose and vulnerable narcissism are related to overconfidence and self-reported metacognitive insight. Building off this work, we present results from an online study of 208 adults (recruited from the U.S. and Canada) examining the relations of trait grandiose and vulnerable narcissism with metacognitive variables related to memory and intelligence. Results indicate that while grandiose and vulnerable narcissism are similarly related to performance on tasks measuring recall, verbal intelligence, and numeracy, only grandiose narcissism was significantly related to metacognitive performance. Specifically, trait grandiose narcissism was positively associated with over-confidence (bias) for performance on memory and verbal intelligence tasks and negatively associated with the ability to discern correct from incorrect responses on the verbal intelligence task (i.e., discrimination index). Our findings suggest that the two types of narcissism differ not only dispositionally but metacognitively in important ways and provide a deeper understanding of the extent to which individual differences in personality attributes may be related to metacognitive abilities.




Citations (71)


... In the first two experiments, memory was assessed with a 2AFC recognition test, and while this kind of test has been used to assess serial position effects in item recognition tasks (e.g., Johnson & Miles, 2009;Ward et al., 2005), it is less commonly used to investigate the production effect (see, Fawcett et al., 2022;Hopkins & Edwards, 1972;MacLeod et al., 2010). In fact, most item recognition studies on the production effect used old-new recognition tests (see, e.g., Bodner & Taikh, 2012;Bodner et al., 2014;Kelly et al., 2024;. Another argument for the use of an old-new recognition test was made by Yonelinas et al. (1992), who found that the list-strength effect (i.e., the lower memory for items within a list following the strengthening of other items from the same list) was observed in an old-new recognition test, but not in a 2AFC test. ...

Reference:

The Interaction Between the Production Effect and Serial Position in Recognition and Recall
Productions Need Not Match Study Items to Confer a Production Advantage, But It Helps

Experimental Psychology

... Based on these studies, we expect confidence level to be negatively correlated with Anxiousness and Depressivity (Hoven et al., 2023a;Rouault et al., 2018;Seow & Gillan, 2020;Benwell et al., 2022;Fox et al., 2023). Conversely, confidence level is anticipated to correlate positively with Grandiosity, as demonstrated in prior research (Littrell et al., 2024(Littrell et al., , 2020Macenczak et al., 2016;O'Reilly & Hall, 2021). Furthermore, confidence is expected to have a positive association with the Psychoticism domain, including its facets such as Perceptual Dysregulation, Unusual Beliefs and Experiences, and Eccentricity (Hoven et al., 2019;Rouault et al., 2018). ...

The metacognitive abilities of narcissists: Individual differences between grandiose and vulnerable subtypes

Personality and Individual Differences

... They reasoned that the lack of a benefit of the interspersed condition could have been due to their study involving a video that was purposefully chosen to hold students' attention and was deemed interesting by students and/or due to students maintaining attention throughout the video due to its short duration. Based on the results of these and other related studies, the benefits of interspersing lecture and activity may be due to a decrease in mind-wandering/task un-related thoughts and an increase in focused attention during learning (e.g., Jing et al., 2016;Risko et al., 2024;Szpunar et al., 2013). It may also be due to higher practice performance when the activity directly follows the presentation of the relevant content (Martella et al., 2024a). ...

Speeding Lectures to Make Time for Retrieval Practice: Can We Improve the Efficiency of Interpolated Testing?

Journal of Experimental Psychology Applied

... The goal of Experiment 1 was to examine the production effect in both mixed-and pure-lists using uncategorized words. The modality of production was a production-bytyping task Forrin et al., 2012;Jamieson & Spear, 2014;Kelly et al., 2024). We chose a production-by-typing procedure as this modality is both understudied and provides a convenient way to collect data online. ...

The prod eff: Partially producing items moderates the production effect
  • Citing Article
  • August 2023

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

... G. Paas & Van Merriënboer, 1994). While required and invested effort are typically related, they can be dissociated (Koriat & Nussinson, 2009;Van Kessel et al., 2023). Both interpolated testing and increasing lecture speed could increase load. ...

EXPRESS: Dissociations between Data-Driven and Goal-Driven Effort Reports: Performance, Metacognition, and Affect
  • Citing Article
  • June 2023

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (2006)

... As mankind moves into the 21st century, a brand new era is ushered in -the digital era based on computer and communication technologies [1]. The birth of the digital era has also set off a profound social change, changing people's lives, work, and consumption and bringing infinite vitality and challenges to the development of all walks of life [2][3]. As a kind of interior design that is closely related to human lifestyle, it is inevitable that it will continue to develop and improve itself along with the development of science, social progress, and the change of times [4][5]. ...

Thinking in the digital age: Everyday cognition and the dawn of a new age of metacognition research
  • Citing Article
  • June 2023

Applied Cognitive Psychology

... All participants were then told about a research finding that explained how the irrelevant attribute might bias target ratings (e.g., age, attractiveness, gender, race) and participants reported the extent to which they perceived that "you [the algorithm/other participants]" showed the biasing tendency on a seven-point Likert scale with endpoints 1 (not at all) and 7 (very much). This absolute judgment of perceived bias was adapted from bias blind spot research (13,15), but avoids a potential confound in comparative judgments of perceived bias between self and other (25). Perceived bias was positively correlated with the actual bias exhibited by individual participants in all nine experiments [r range = 0.17 to 0.38; r average = 0.28 (95% CI = 0.24, 0.31)]; these correlations are high relative to correlations reported in bias blind spot papers comparing perceived and actual bias (e.g., r range = −0.25 to 0.14) (15). ...

Hypothesized drivers of the bias blind spot-cognitive sophistication, introspection bias, and conversational processes

Judgment and Decision Making

... Second, interpersonal eye-tracking has shown that people engage in significantly less mutual gaze than traditional non-naturalistic paradigms would predict. This behavior likely stems from individuals' reluctance to appear as though they are fixating on their interaction partner, a concern that is absent when looking at static images (Laidlaw et al., 2016;Macdonald and Tatler, 2018). Third, interpersonal eye-tracking has revealed how social context can change gaze behavior. ...

Levels of Complexity and the Duality of Gaze: How Social Attention Changes from Lab to Life
  • Citing Chapter
  • October 2016

... It was not obvious what to predict for children in this age range, which is the reason that we have targeted this issue here. Shifts in the use of external resources likely require monitoring the effort needed to use working memory (Kelly & Risko, 2022), but children's ability to identify, or opt for, an easier task (Niebaum & Munakata, 2020; , 2017) or to use external resources selectively on the basis of the difficulty of a task (Armitage et al., 2020;Bulley et al., 2020) is only beginning to emerge at 5 years of age. Although we did not find compelling age interactions in Experiment 1, there were trends that, combined with this literature, led us to the conservative prediction that children in this 5-to 6-year age range would not be able to trade off external versus internal resources in response to changing access costs. ...

Study effort and the memory cost of external store availability
  • Citing Article
  • November 2022

Cognition

... The idea that people's aversion to boredom and effort are a function of available alternatives highlights both the limits of the cognitive miser account (Fiske & Taylor, 1991) and the importance of context on people's willingness to exert mental effort (for other examples of context effects on effort, see Ashburner & Risko, 2022;Desjardins et al., 2023;Otto & Vassena, 2021;Otto et al., 2022). According to opportunity cost theories of effort aversion (Kurzban et al., 2013;Kurzban, 2016), the reason mental exertion is experienced as costly is because the 'sense of effort' experienced indexes the value of the current task relative to available alternatives, rather than simply indexing the raw computational resources demanded by a task. ...

On the Influence of Evaluation Context on Judgments of Effort

Journal of Experimental Psychology Human Perception & Performance