Publications

Abstract

Mozer, M. C., Howe, M., & Pashler, H. (2004). Using testing to enhance learning: A comparison of two hypotheses. Proceedings of the Twenty Sixth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 975-980). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum Assoccciates.

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Students learning facts such as foreign language vocabulary often rely on a self-testing procedure in which they cue themselves with the English word and try to recall the foreign language target, instead of simply memorizing cue-target pairs. The value of this strategy has been empirically verified by a long history of research, yet existing computational models of human learning do not address the enhancing-learning-through-testing phenomenon. Using a simple, well studied model—a feedforward neural net with no hidden units—we propose two different hypotheses for characterizing the phenomenon. Hypothesis 1 is that self-testing generates a target which is used for additional training. Hypothesis 2 is that selftesting produces a more reliable error signal for training than rote memorization. Through simulation studies, we find that hypothesis 2 readily explains the phenomenon whereas hypothesis 1 does not. Further, hypothesis 2 makes predictions worthy of further empirical study, and can be viewed as a natural consequence of temporal difference learning.