Making guesses during learning can be beneficial for older adults' memory.

Abstract

When young adults complete a pretest (e.g., star-?) before to-be-learned material is studied (e.g., star-night), their recall of the material is typically enhanced on a subsequent final test compared to material studied without initial pretesting. The present two experiments investigated whether this pretesting effect arises also in older adults and is modulated in size when repeated guessing attempts are made during pretesting. Sixty young adults (mean age = 24.5 years) and 60 older adults (mean age = 68.6 years) took part in Experiment 1, while 54 young adults (mean age = 21.8 years) and 54 older adults (mean age = 66.6 years) took part in Experiment 2. Results showed that, like young adults, older adults can benefit from a single guessing attempt made during pretesting, both when weakly associated word pairs (Experiment 1) and prose passages (Experiment 2) were used as study material. However, multiple guessing attempts during pretesting led to an additional recall benefit when word pairs but not when prose passages had been studied. Experiment 2 also examined possible transfer effects of pretesting and showed a lack of transfer to previously studied but untested information, for both young and older adults. The results are discussed with respect to prominent accounts of the pretesting effect. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).