Department of Psychology, University of Guelph College of Social and Applied Human Sciences, Guelph, ON, Canada.
Exp Psychol. 2022 May;69(3):119-131. doi: 10.1027/1618-3169/a000551. Epub 2022 Aug 17.
Memory for paired-associate words is facilitated by interim testing relative to restudy. According to the mediator effectiveness hypothesis, the benefit of retrieval practice is a consequence of the activation of a mediator word linking the cue and target. Evidence for the activation of cue-related mediators stems from the finding that mediators are more effective at prompting recall of target words than are words not associated with the original cue, a pattern that is larger following testing than restudy. The benefit of testing for the unstudied cues at the final test is referred to as transfer of test-enhanced learning. One goal of the current study was to examine whether the activation of mediators leads to the recall of targets indirectly via the original cues in a process known as backward chaining. We indexed backward chaining with the probability of incorrectly recalling a trial-specific original cue in place of a target. The second goal was to explore whether testing would yield a transfer effect for cues associated with target words. In four experiments, following an initial study of weakly related word pairs (e.g., Mother-CHILD), participants either restudied the pairs or attempted to recall the target given the original cue (e.g., Mother). On a final cued-recall test, participants were presented with unstudied cues that were related to either the original cue (semantic mediators, e.g., Father) or the target (target-related cues, e.g., Baby). The type of new cue presented on the final test was varied either between subjects (Experiment 1) or mixed within a list (Experiments 2, 3, and 4). Mixing mediators and target-related cues reduced the transfer of test-enhanced learning and increased the likelihood of recalling the original cues when shown a mediator. These results challenge the assumptions of the mediator effectiveness hypothesis.
相对于复习而言，中间测试会促进配对联想词的记忆。根据中介有效性假设，检索练习的好处是激活一个中介词的结果，该中介词将提示和目标联系起来。提示相关中介词激活的证据源于这样一个发现：与原始提示不相关的词更有效地提示目标词的回忆，这种模式在测试后比复习后更大。在最终测试中对未学习的提示进行测试的好处称为测试增强学习的转移。本研究的一个目标是检验中介词的激活是否通过原始提示间接地导致目标的回忆，这一过程被称为逆向链接。我们通过以错误地回忆特定于试验的原始提示代替目标的概率来索引逆向链接。第二个目标是探索测试是否会对与目标词相关的提示产生转移效应。在四个实验中，在最初研究了弱相关的单词对（例如，Mother-CHILD）之后，参与者要么重新学习这些对，要么尝试根据原始提示回忆目标（例如，Mother）。在最终的提示回忆测试中，参与者会看到与原始提示相关的未学习提示（语义中介词，例如，Father）或目标（目标相关提示，例如，Baby）。在最终测试中呈现的新提示的类型在被试之间是不同的（实验 1）或在列表内混合的（实验 2、3 和 4）。混合中介词和目标相关提示会降低测试增强学习的转移，并增加在呈现中介词时回忆原始提示的可能性。这些结果对中介有效性假设的假设提出了挑战。
