ArticlePsychonomic bulletin & review2022
Explicitly predicting outcomes enhances learning of expectancy-violating information.
Article in Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Does signed prediction error drive declarative memory? Evidence from variable choice paradigms.Memory & cognition · 2026Article
- Differential effects of contextual congruency on recognition and retrieval of perceptual details.Memory & cognition · 2026Article
- The Anterior Insula Processes a Time-Resolved Subjective Risk Prediction Error.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Unexpected words that become your best memories: How sentential constraint and word expectedness affect memory retrieval.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Article
- Schema-driven prediction effects on episodic memory across the lifespan.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Seeing the Error in My "Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Predictive coding models suggest that the brain constantly makes predictions about what will happen next based on past experiences. Learning is triggered by surprising events, i.e., a prediction error. Does it benefit learning when these predictions are made deliberately, so that an individual explicitly commits to an outcome before experiencing it? Across two experiments, we tested whether generating an explicit prediction before seeing numerical facts boosts learning of expectancy-violating information relative to doing so post hoc. Across both experiments, predicting boosted memory for highly unexpected outcomes, leading to a U-shaped relation between expectedness and memory. In the post hoc condition, memory performance decreased with increased unexpectedness. Pupillary data of Experiment 2 further indicated that the pupillary surprise response to highly expectancy-violating outcomes predicted successful learning of these outcomes. Together, these findings suggest that generating an explicit prediction increases learners' stakes in the outcome, which particularly benefits learning of those outcomes that are different than expected.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.