Kliegl Oliver, Kriechbaum Verena M, Bäuml Karl-Heinz T
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany.
Front Psychol. 2022 May 6;13:889622. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.889622. eCollection 2022.
The forward testing effect (FTE) refers to the finding that retrieval practice of previously studied material can facilitate retention of newly studied material more than does restudy of the material. The goal of the present study was to examine how such retrieval practice affects initially studied, unpracticed material. To this end, we used two commonly applied versions of the FTE task, consisting of either three (Experiment 1) or five (Experiment 2) study lists. While study of list 1 was always followed by an unrelated distractor activity, study of list 2 (3-list version) or lists 2, 3, and 4 (5-list version) was followed by either interim restudy or retrieval practice of the immediately preceding list. After studying all lists, participants were either asked to recall the first or last study list. Results showed that, for both the three-list and five-list versions, interim retrieval practice led to a typical FTE, irrespective of whether unrelated or categorized study lists were used. Going beyond the prior work, interim retrieval practice was found to have no effect on initially studied, unpracticed material, regardless of the type of study material. The findings suggest that using interim retrieval practice as a study method can improve recall of the last studied list without incurring a cost for the initially studied material. Our results are difficult to align with the view that retrieval practice induces context change, but are consistent with the idea that retrieval practice can lead participants to employ superior encoding strategies.
前向测试效应（FTE）指的是这样一个发现：对先前学习材料的检索练习比重新学习该材料更能促进对新学习材料的记忆保持。本研究的目的是考察这种检索练习如何影响最初学习的、未进行练习的材料。为此，我们使用了两种常用版本的FTE任务，分别由三个（实验1）或五个（实验列表2（三列表版本）或列表2、3和4（五列表版本）的学习之后，要么是对前一个列表进行临时重新学习，要么是进行检索练习。在学习完所有列表后，要求参与者回忆第一个或最后一个学习列表。结果表明，对于三列表和五列表版本，临时检索练习都会导致典型的FTE，无论使用的是不相关的还是分类的学习列表。与之前的研究不同，临时检索练习被发现对最初学习的、未进行练习的材料没有影响，无论学习材料的类型如何。研究结果表明，将临时检索练习作为一种学习方法可以提高对最后学习列表的回忆，而不会对最初学习的材料造成损失。我们的结果很难与检索练习会引起情境变化的观点相一致，但与检索练习可以引导参与者采用更好的编码策略的观点一致。
