The desirable difficulty effect observed in Experiments 1 and 2 was replicated in Experiments 3A, 3B, and 3C, despite varying encoding intent during study, context reinstatement at the time of test, study list length, and the nature of the distractor task between study and test phases.
However, stronger evidence for continuous mediation in eyewitness situations would take the form of continuous c2 patterns (c2 S > c2 W) when there is a mismatch of faces between study and test.
By using a mismatch of faces between study and test to better approximate an eyewitness decision, this experiment provides a more robust test of the mediation involved in facial recognition, which allows for a better evaluation of the relative judgment theory.
In a large-scale study, Cepeda, Vul, Rohrer, Wixted, and Pashler (2008) examined the effects of the gap between study sessions and the interval between study and test across long periods, and found that the optimal gap between study sessions was contingent on the retention interval.
Figure 2 shows that study-to-test changes in relative size influenced priming but only when the target size changed between study and test and only for target objects displayed as large at test.
Moreover, consistent with previous findings with human faces [33], [34], Uttl et al. [1] recently reported that the effects of changing object size between study and test on explicit memory are asymmetric.
In most previous studies, the Navon stimuli were introduced between the study and test phases.
According to a comparison between the study and test data sets, plasma concentrations of Pro, Ile and Orn were higher in each data set, while the concentrations of Gln, His and Trp were lower.
During the interval between the "study" and "test" sessions, subjects were allowed to leave the lab and go about their normal daily activities, with the exception of the 90-min sleep opportunity in the Nap group.
This theory aligns with experiments demonstrating that study is as or more effective as testing when the delay before a final test is very short (see, e.g., Roediger and Karpicke, 2006a), because the very short delay between study and the final test means that retrieval strength is very high an experience many students can verify from their own experience cramming.
For standard ultrasound the direction of the association between study quality and test performance was the same for all scoring schemes.
