Does increasing metacognitive awareness alleviate retrieval-induced forgetting effects

Retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) is a phenomenon wherein individuals have difficulty retrieving semantic associates of items that have been practiced. Researchers have attempted to identify what causes RIF and how to alleviate it. An open question was whether individuals were aware of the tendency for RIF to occur and whether raising awareness enabled them to reduce forgetting. This study examined whether increasing metacognitive awareness reduced RIF. Participants were randomly assigned to either a control condition or one of two experimental conditions and exposed to two study - retrieval-practice - recall test trials. Of interest was whether RIF was higher in the baseline condition relative to the experimental conditions where participants were asked to count the number of items recalled or explicitly warned about RIF. RIF rates increased across trials in the baseline and informed count conditions, but remained stable in the warning condition, suggesting manipulations must be explicit to affect forgetting.