Cho Kit W, Neely James H, Crocco Stephanie, Vitrano Deana
a Department of Social Sciences , University of Houston-Downtown , Houston , TX , USA.
b Department of Psychology , University at Albany, State University of New York , Albany , NY , USA.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2017 Jul;70(7):1211-1235. doi: 10.1080/17470218.2016.1175485. Epub 2016 May 3.
In forward testing effects, taking a test enhances memory for subsequently studied material. These effects have been observed for previously studied and tested items, a potentially item-specific testing effect, and newly studied untested items, a purely generalized testing effect. We directly compared item-specific and generalized forward testing effects using procedures to separate testing benefits due to encoding versus retrieval. Participants studied two lists of Swahili-English word pairs, with the second study list containing "new" pairs intermixed with the previously studied "old" pairs. Participants completed a review phase in which they took a cued-recall test on only the "old" pairs or restudied them. In Experiments 1a, 1b, and 2, the review phase was given either before or after the second study list. Testing benefited memory to the same degree for both "new" and "old" pairs, suggesting that there were no pair-specific benefits of testing. The larger benefit from testing when review was given before rather than after the second study list suggests that the memory enhancement was due to both testing-enhanced encoding and testing-enhanced retrieval. To better equate generalized testing effects for "new" and "old" pairs, Experiment 3 intermixed them in the review phase. A statistically significant pair-specific testing effect for "old" items was now observed. Overall, these results show that forward testing effects are due to both testing-enhanced encoding and retrieval effects and that direct, pair-specific forward testing benefits are considerably smaller than indirect, generalized forward testing benefits.
在前瞻性测试效应中，进行一次测试会增强对随后学习材料的记忆。对于之前学习并测试过的项目（一种潜在的特定项目测试效应）以及新学习但未测试过的项目（一种纯粹的泛化测试效应），都观察到了这些效应。我们使用程序来区分由于编码与检索产生的测试益处，从而直接比较特定项目和泛化的前瞻性测试效应。参与者学习了两组斯瓦希里语 - 英语单词对列表，第二个学习列表包含与之前学习的“旧”对混合在一起的“新”对。参与者完成了一个复习阶段，在这个阶段他们只对“旧”对进行线索回忆测试或者重新学习它们。在实验1a、1b和2中，复习阶段在第二个学习列表之前或之后进行。对于“新”对和“旧”对，测试对记忆的益处程度相同，这表明测试不存在特定对的益处。当复习在第二个学习列表之前而不是之后进行时，测试带来的益处更大，这表明记忆增强是由于测试增强的编码和测试增强的检索。为了更好地使“新”对和“旧”对的泛化测试效应相等，实验3在复习阶段将它们混合。现在观察到了针对“旧”项目的具有统计学意义的特定对测试效应。总体而言，这些结果表明前瞻性测试效应是由于测试增强的编码和检索效应，并且直接的、特定对的前瞻性测试益处比间接的、泛化的前瞻性测试益处小得多。
