Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Errors are common during learning, but what factorsinfluence whether those errors are corrected? Evidencesuggests error generation and memory for errors may be twoimportant factors. Middle-school children studied and weretested on their memory for math definitions. After receivingcorrect answer feedback, children recalled their initial testanswers before taking a final test. Memory for errors anderror correction rates were higher for errors that weregenerated compared to errors that were chosen from a list.Further, memory for errors was positively correlated witherror correction, even after controlling for age, grade, andmath and reading skills. However, this relationship was onlypresent for errors that were generated and not for errors thatwere chosen from a list. These findings suggest retrievalplays an important role in the relationship between memoryfor errors and error correction.