Providing Judgments of Learning (JOLs) for cue-target pairs at study often improves recall for related pairs versus a silent reading control task, a pattern termed JOL reactivity. While reactivity patterns have been found consistently using a variety of stimuli and test types, they appear to only occur when participants are explicitly instructed to provide JOLs. Whether JOL reactivity can carry over to cue-target pairs when JOLs are not directly applied is unclear. We evaluated this possibility by comparing cued-recall between two study-test blocks. In two experiments, participants either provided JOLs on both blocks or only in the first block with instructions to provide covert JOLs on the second block. Although JOL reactivity was found with explicit JOLs in the first block, it did not carry over to covert JOLs in the second block (Experiment 1), nor did reactivity carry over when participants were frequently reminded to make covert JOLs (Experiment 2). Reactivity therefore appears to be a byproduct of overtly provided judgments.
Morehead et al. (Thu,) studied this question.