When does testing enhance retention? A distribution-based interpretation of retrieval as a memory modifier.

Tests, as learning events, can enhance subsequent recall more than do additional study opportunities, even without feedback. Such advantages of testing tend to appear, however, only at long retention intervals and/or when criterion tests stress recall, rather than recognition, processes. We propose that the interaction of the benefits of testing versus restudying with final-test delay and format reflects not only that successful retrievals are more powerful learning events than are re-presentations but also that the distribution of memory strengths across items is shifted differentially by testing and restudying. The benefits of initial testing over restudying, in this view, should increase as the delay or format of the final test makes that test more difficult. Final-test difficulty, not the similarity of initial-test and final-test conditions, should determine the benefits of testing. In Experiments 1 and 2 we indeed found that initial cued-recall testing enhanced subsequent recall more than did restudying when the final test was a difficult (free-recall) test but not when it was an easier (cued-recall) test that matched the initial test. The results of Experiment 3 supported a new prediction of the distribution framework: namely, that the final cued-recall test that did not show a benefit of testing in Experiment 1 should show such a benefit when that test was made more difficult by introducing retroactive interference. Overall, our results suggest that the differential consequences of initial testing versus restudying reflect, in part, differences in how items distributions are shifted by testing and studying. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Retrieval practice improves memory in multiple sclerosis: Clinical application of the testing effect.

The testing effect is a robust cognitive phenomenon by which memory retrieval on a test improves subsequent recall more than restudying. Also known as retrieval practice, the testing effect has been studied almost exclusively in healthy undergraduates. The current study investigated whether retrieval practice during testing leads to better delayed recall than restudy among persons with multiple sclerosis (MS), a neurologic disease associated with memory dysfunction. In a within-subjects design, 32 persons with MS and 16 demographically matched healthy controls (HC) studied 48 verbal paired associates (VPA) divided across 3 learning conditions: massed restudy (MR), spaced restudy (SR), and spaced testing (ST). Delayed VPA cued recall was measured after 45 min. There was a large main effect of learning condition (ηp2 = .54, p     

Are independent probes truly independent?

The independent cue technique has been developed to test traditional interference theories against inhibition theories of forgetting. In the present study, the authors tested the critical criterion for the independence of independent cues: Studied cues not presented during test (and unrelated to test cues) should not contribute to the retrieval process. Participants first studied a subset of cues (e.g., rope) that were subsequently studied together with a target in a 2nd study phase (e.g., rope–sailing, sunflower–yellow). In the test phase, an extralist category cue (e.g., sports, color) was presented, and participants were instructed to recall an item from the study list that was a member of the category (e.g., sailing, yellow). The experiments showed that previous study of the paired-associate word (e.g., rope) enhanced category cued recall even though this word was not presented at test. This experimental demonstration of covert cuing has important implications for the effectiveness of the independent cue technique. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The role of inhibitory processes in part-list cuing.

Providing a subset of studied items as retrieval cues can have detrimental effects on recall of the remaining items. In 2 experiments, the authors examined such part-list cuing impairment in a repeatedtesting situation. Participants studied exemplars from several semantic categories and were given 2 successive cued-recall tests separated by a distractor task of several minutes. Part-list cues were provided in the 1st test but not the 2nd. Noncue item recall was tested with the studied category cues (same probes) in the 1st test, but novel, unstudied retrieval cues (independent probes) in the 2nd test. The authors found detrimental effects of part-list cues in both the 1st (same-probe) test and the 2nd (independent-probe) test. These results show that part-list cuing impairment can be lasting and is not eliminated with independent probes. The findings support the view that the impairment was caused by retrieval inhibition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Interpreting the influence of implicitly activated memories on recall and recognition.

A model concerning the influence of implicitly activated information on cued recall and recognition is presented. The model assumes that studying a familiar word activates its associates and creates an implicit representation in long-term working memory. Test cues also activate their associates, with memory performance determined by a sampling process that operates on the intersection of information activated by the test cue with information previously activated by the studied word. Successful sampling is enhanced by preexisting connections among the associates of the studied word and by preexisting connections between it and the retrieval cue. However, the usefulness of the implicit representation is reduced by the activation of competing associates and by shifts of attention before testing. Experiments designed to test predictions of the model indicate that the associates of a familiar word can exert a powerful effect on its cued recall and recognition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cue familiarity but not target retrievability enhances feeling-of-knowing judgments.

Two hypotheses concerning people's ability to predict later memory performance for unrecalled items were investigated. The target retrievability hypothesis states that feeling-of-knowing judgments (FKJs) are based on partial target information, and the cue familiarity hypothesis asserts that they are based on recognition of the cues. In Exps 1 and 2, Ss either generated or read the targets of paired associates. Half of the cues had been primed in a pleasantness-rating task. The generation manipulation increased recall but had no effect on FKJs. Cue priming had no effect on recall but increased FKJs. In Exp 3, using general information questions primed after the initial recall attempt, both cue and target priming increased FKJs. Exp 4, which remedied difficulties in Exp 3, showed no effect of target priming, whereas cue priming increased FKJs. The results favor the cue familiarity hypothesis. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Exhaustive and heuristic retrieval processes in person cognition: Further tests of the TRAP model.

The twofold retrieval by associative pathways (TRAP) model (L. Garcia-Marques & D. L. Hamilton, 1996) proposes that two distinct modes of retrieval typically underlie recall and frequency estimation. The model accounts for the simultaneous occurrence of greater recall of incongruent information and higher frequency estimation of congruent information. Three experiments provided further tests of the TRAP model. Experiment 1 manipulated cognitive load (at encoding and at retrieval) and the selectivity of the retrieval goal. Under either high load or a selective retrieval goal, incongruent items ceased to be better recalled. Experiment 2 manipulated the accessibility of expectancy-congruent, -incongruent, or -neutral episodes and found corresponding effects in frequency estimates. Finally, Experiment 3 showed that providing part-list retrieval cues inhibits recall but increases frequency estimates. The TRAP model predicted these results. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Structural analysis of memory traces in children from 4 to 10 years of age.

In 2 experiments, items from 4 (or 8) semantic categories were presented in 4 (or 8) colors located at 4 (or 8) spatial positions. In a recall task, a total of 48 4-, 7-, and 10-yr-olds were given semantic, color, and locational cues. The probability of successful cued recall to each type of cue and cue combination was used to estimate the proportion of memory traces that contained the various types of information. Although recall increased with age, the relative effectiveness of the 3 types of cues did not, and the estimated proportion of memory traces for the set of items that contained semantic information was higher than the estimated proportion having color and locational information. Retention of one type of cue information was not independent of retention of other types of cue information; Ss of all ages tended to retain either none or more than 1 of the 3 kinds of information. (21 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Retrieval failure in the presence of retrieval cues: A comparison of three age groups.

Cued recall of preteens, young adults, and senior adults (480 Ss) was compared under 7 conditions of practice. (Preteens were 11–12 yrs old; young adults were college students; senior adults had a mean age of 47.5 yrs.) The independent variable was the number of items in the list which began with the same letter of the alphabet; the number of items per alphabetic cue was 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, or 12. The interaction between age and the number of items per cue was not significant, thus permitting the inference that retrieval failure due to the number of items per cue was invariant with age. This result is discussed in terms of cue overload, and the suggestion is offered that cue overload may result from information lost when memory traces carrying the same retrieval information interact and are recoded. Further analyses pursued the nature and locus of the items not recalled by preteens and senior adults, and the judgment is made that the retrieval failure in these 2 age groups, although comparable in quantity, is probably different in quality. Also reported is the finding that, under free-recall conditions, senior adults were able to recall as well as young adults, and this result was related to the greater opportunity for meaningful organization in free recall than in cued-alphabetic recall. (French summary) (30 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aging and the stability of activation and sampling in cued recall.

Age effects in cued recall were investigated as a function of activation and sampling of preexisting associates of the test cue. Young adults, community-dwelling elderly, and elderly patients studied lists of unrelated words and were tested with extralist cues. Preexperimental strength between test cues and studied words was manipulated to discern differences in activation, and normative size of the set of associates was manipulated to discern differences in sampling. Test delay and prior testing were also manipulated in Exp 1. Although large age effects were found with phonemic and taxonomic test cues, young and older Ss showed comparable effects of strength and set size, suggesting that age effects were not due to activation and sampling differences. Test delay and prior testing also had comparable effects. Implications for age effects in episodic cued recall are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Exploring a mnemonic debiasing account of the underconfidence-with-practice effect.

Judgments of learning (JOLs) underestimate the increase in recall that occurs with repeated study (the underconfidence-with-practice effect; UWP). The authors explore an account in terms of a foresight bias in which JOLs are inflated when the to-be-recalled target highlights aspects of the cue that are not transparent when the cue appears alone and the tendency of practice to alleviate bias by providing learners with cues pertinent to recall. In 3 experiments the UWP effect was strongest for items that induce a foresight bias, but delaying JOLs reduced the debiasing effects of practice, thereby moderating the UWP effect. This occurred when delayed JOLs were prompted by the cue alone (like during testing), not when prompted by the cue-target pair (like during study). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Knowing what to remember and forget: a developmental study of cue memory in intentional forgetting

These experiments are the first to investigate children's encoding and use of information about a memory cue in Bjork's (1972) intentional forgetting task. In Experiment 1, children in Grades 2, 4, and 6 and college students were given cues to either remember or forget after the presentation of each picture. Recall and recognition tests of pictures and cues followed. The procedure in Experiment 2 was identical to that in Experiment 1 except that the list of presentation pictures was altered for some children (Grades 3 and 4) and adolescents (Grades 8 and 9) so that remember and forget cues were associated with particular taxonomic categories. In Experiment 3, the testing component was modified so that children (Grades 2, 3, and 4) and college students were asked to recall only the cue associated with each picture. The results indicated that (1) children as young as second graders encode the cue associated with each picture, although to a lesser extent than do college students, (2) much improvement in intentional forgetting is still occurring during adolescence, (3) only adults adequately cluster their recall by cue, (4) associating remember and forget cues with items from different categories does not increase the differentiation between cues, and (5) eliminating picture recall and recognition has minimal effects on the magnitude of cue judgments. These results suggest that children's difficulties on intentional forgetting tasks stem, at least in part, from their poorer encoding of information about whether an item should be remembered or forgotten.     

Interference from retrieval cues in Parkinson's disease.

Objective: Existing studies on memory interference in Parkinson's disease (PD) patients have provided mixed results and it is unknown whether PD patients have problems in overcoming interference from retrieval cues. We investigated this issue by using a part-list cuing paradigm. In this paradigm, after the study of a list of items, the presentation of some of these items as retrieval cues hinders the recall of the remaining ones. Method: We tested PD patients' (n = 19) and control participants' (n = 16) episodic memory in the presence and absence of part-list cues, using initial-letter probes, and following either weak or strong serial associative encoding of list items. Results: Both PD patients and control participants showed a comparable and significant part-list cuing effect after weak associative encoding (13% vs. 12% decrease in retrieval in part-list cuing vs. no part-list cuing -control- conditions in PD patients and control participants, respectively), denoting a similar effect of cue-driven interference in the two populations when a serial retrieval strategy is hard to develop. However, only PD patients showed a significant part-list cuing effect after strong associative encoding (20% vs. 5% decrease in retrieval in patients and controls, respectively). Conclusions: When encoding promotes the development of an effective serial retrieval strategy, the presentation of part-list cues has a specifically disruptive effect in PD patients. This indicates problems in strategic retrieval, probably related to PD patients' increased tendency to rely on external cues. Findings in control conditions suggest that less effective encoding may have contributed to PD patients' memory performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Selecting a response in task switching: Testing a model of compound cue retrieval.

How can a task-appropriate response be selected for an ambiguous target stimulus in task-switching situations? One answer is to use compound cue retrieval, whereby stimuli serve as joint retrieval cues to select a response from long-term memory. In the present study, the authors tested how well a model of compound cue retrieval could account for a complex pattern of congruency effects arising from a procedure in which a cue, prime, and target were presented on each trial. A comparison of alternative models of prime-based effects revealed that the best model was one in which all stimuli participated directly in the process of retrieving a response, validating previous modeling efforts. Relations to current theorizing about response congruency effects and models of response selection in task switching are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Comparing word fragment completion and cued recall with letter cues.

Cued recall with word stems as cues and fragment completion rely on different types of letter cues and also differ in the explicit–implicit nature of the retrieval orientation. Despite these differences, variables effective in one task may be effective in the other because both rely on letter cues. Two variables known to affect cued recall were manipulated: Lexical set size (number of words that fit the letter cue) and meaning set size (number of associates generated to the studied words). Across four experiments, subjects in each task were less likely to recover targets from larger lexical sets. However, meaning set size affected cued recall but not fragment completion. These results indicate that fragment completion and letter-cued recall are based on lexical search but that cued recall also involves a semantic search component. Furthermore, type of retrieval cue had a greater effect than type of retrieval orientation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The influence of learning methods on collaboration: Prior repeated retrieval enhances retrieval organization, abolishes collaborative inhibition, and promotes post-collaborative memory.

Research on collaborative memory has unveiled the counterintuitive yet robust phenomenon that collaboration impairs group recall. A candidate explanation for this collaborative inhibition effect is the disruption of people's idiosyncratic retrieval strategies during collaboration, and it is hypothesized that employing methods that improve one's organization protects against retrieval disruption. Here it is investigated how one's learning method during the study phase—defined as either repeatedly studying or repeatedly retrieving information—influences retrieval organization and what effects this has on collaborative recall and post-collaborative individual recall. Results show that repeated retrieval consistently eliminated collaborative inhibition. This enabled participants to gain the most from re-exposure to materials recalled by their partners that they themselves did not recall and led to improvements in their individual memory following collaboration. This repeated retrieval advantage stemmed from the preferential manner in which this learning method strengthened retrieval organization. Findings are also discussed that reveal a relationship between retrieval organization and the interaction observed between learning method and short versus long delay seen in the testing effect literature. Finally, results show that the elusive benefits of cross-cuing during collaboration may be best detected with a longer study–test delay. Together, these findings illuminate when and how collaboration can enhance memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

The role of integration in recognition failure and action memory

In three experiments, we studied memory for action events with respect to exceptions from the Tulving-Wiseman function demonstrated in experiments on recognition failure of recallable words. In Experiment 1, we examined exceptions of poor integration in a regular recognition failure condition (i.e., recognition of targets without contextual cues, followed by recall of targets in the presence of contextual cues). In Experiment 2, we examined exceptions of cue overlap in which subjects also had access to the information of contextual cues at recognition test. In Experiment 3, we attempted to equate the levels of recognition across the action and verbal encoding. In addition, the cue overlap and no-cue overlap conditions were studied in a within-subjects design. Results from the three experiments indicated that encoding enactment (episodic integration) and conceptual integration (semantic integration) are related to each other. As a consequence of this relationship, there is a larger independence between recognition and recall of well-integrated items with encoding enactment. On the other hand, for the poorly integrated items without encoding enactment, there is a larger dependence between recognition and recall. Even in the cue overlap condition, where there is a case of large dependence between recognition and recall, the same pattern of data was observed. The results are discussed in terms of an episodic integration view of encoding enactment.     

Encoding and retrieval operations in relation to age.

In 2 experiments, the memory performance of a total of 40 young (mean age 18 yrs) and 40 elderly (mean age 75 yrs) Ss was compared in a procedure that allowed testing of the target words twice, first for recognition and then for cued recall. Conventional analyses of the recall and recognition data gave results that echoed previous findings that (a) significant age differences were found in recall but not in recognition, and (b) the recall differences were minimized when the target items were recalled in the context of cues highly related to the target items. In accordance with contemporary theoretical conceptions of memory, a feasible interpretation of these results is that memory loss is due to a retrieval deficit. However, further analyses showed that both young and older Ss failed to recognize many words that they subsequently recalled, suggesting that some caution is necessary in interpreting overall recall and recognition memory performance. Possible differences in encoding and retrieval processes as a function of age are discussed. (18 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Is there hypermnesia and reminiscence for information intentionally forgotten?

Memory performance was examined across consecutive tests in three directed-forgetting experiments. Following word-method or list-method cueing to forget, significant directed forgetting was observed for all tests: Free recall for remember cue words always exceeded free recall for forget cue words. Moreover, following either cueing method, similar magnitudes of hypermnesia (improved free recall across tests) and reminiscence (recovery of words across tests) were observed for both word types. Regardless of cueing method, after an initial free recall test, the level of recovery for both word types did not differ significantly. That is, directed forgetting was not observed for the reminiscence data. Taken together, the results suggest that cues to forget impair the encoding of information but, after an initial memory test, they do not interrupt the accessing of that information. These findings are consistent with the selective rehearsal account but not the retrieval inhibition account of directed forgetting. (French abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Long-term cued recall of tasks in senile dementia.

Participants with senile dementia of the Alzheimer's type, vascular dementia, or both, associated a task with a cue. On reinstatement of the cue 1 day later, a substantial portion of the sample recalled the task. The teaching method, both with and without participant performance of the task (PPT), was spaced retrieval with supplementary or fading cues provided as required. Findings were that (a) PPT encoding and retrieval encoding, separately, assisted later recall; (b) retrieval combined with PPT encoding increased the probability of task performance at final recall; (c) repetition in the absence of retrieval or PPT was less effective; and (d) there was no forgetting between 1 hr and 1 day. Theoretical and clinical aspects of these findings are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)