When deliberate errors boost learning: Semantic constraints on the derring effect

A recent series of studies has demonstrated an unusual effect in which generating deliberate errors benefits memory for complex information-a phenomenon termed the derring effect. However, evidence for this effect is mixed, and theoretical understanding is underdeveloped. Inspired by the pretesting literature, the current work examined the derring effect under carefully controlled experimental conditions before going on to test theoretical explanations for the observed effect. In four preregistered experiments, participants studied weakly related word pairs in errorful and errorless learning conditions before completing a cued-recall test. In Experiment 1, both unintentional and deliberate errors enhanced subsequent memory relative to their respective errorless learning conditions, replicating the well-established pretesting effect and providing preliminary evidence of a derring effect with paired associates. Experiments 2-4 tested two theoretical accounts for the benefits of deliberate error generation: a broad attentional account, which proposes that generating errors boosts attention to the target, and a semantic elaboration account, which proposes that deliberate errors encourage elaboration of related information. Participants generated semantically related or semantically unrelated errors for each target or simply copied the correct answer. Consistent with the semantic elaboration account, deliberate errors only enhanced memory when they were semantically related to the study materials. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).