Rowland Christopher A, DeLosh Edward L
Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA,
Psychon Bull Rev. 2014 Dec;21(6):1516-23. doi: 10.3758/s13423-014-0625-2.
Testing is a powerful means to boost the retention of information. The extent to which the benefits of testing generalize to nontested information, however, is not clear. In three experiments, we found that completing cued-recall tests for a subset of studied materials enhanced retention for the specific information tested, as well as for associated, nontested information during later free-recall testing. In Experiment 1, this generalized benefit was revealed for lists of category-exemplar pairs. Experiment 2 extended the effect to unrelated words, suggesting that retrieval can enhance later free recall of nontested information that is bound solely through episodic context. In Experiment 3, we manipulated the format of the final test and found facilitation in free-recall, but not in cued-recall, testing. The results suggest that testing may facilitate later free recall in part by enhancing access to information that is present during a prior temporal or list context. More generally, these findings suggest that retrieval-induced facilitation extends to a broader range of conditions than has previously been suggested, and they further motivate the adoption of testing as a practical and effective learning tool.
测试是增强信息留存的有力手段。然而，测试的益处能在多大程度上推广到未测试的信息上尚不清楚。在三项实验中，我们发现，对一部分学习材料完成线索回忆测试，不仅能增强对所测试的特定信息的留存，还能增强后续自由回忆测试中相关的未测试信息的留存。在实验1中，对于类别范例对列表，这种普遍的益处得以显现。实验2将这一效应扩展到不相关的单词上，表明检索可以增强对仅通过情景背景联系在一起的未测试信息的后续自由回忆。在实验3中，我们操纵了最终测试的形式，发现在自由回忆测试中出现了促进作用，但在线索回忆测试中没有。结果表明，测试可能部分地通过增强对先前时间或列表背景中存在的信息的获取来促进后续的自由回忆。更普遍地说，这些发现表明，检索诱导的促进作用扩展到比先前认为的更广泛的条件范围，它们进一步促使人们采用测试作为一种实用且有效的学习工具。
