Does retrieval practice depend on semantic cues? Assessing the fuzzy trace account of the testing effect

ABSTRACT

Retrieval practice enhances long-term retention more than restudying; a phenomenon called the testing effect. The fuzzy trace explanation predicts that a testing effect will already emerge after a short interval when participants are solely provided with semantic cues in the final test. In the present study, we assessed this explanation by gradually reducing the surface features overlap between cues in the learning phase and the final recognition test. In all five experiments, participants in the control/word condition received as final test cues the same words as in the learning phase. The experimental final test cues consisted of scrambled words, words in a new context, scrambled words in a new context (Experiment 1), synonyms (Experiment 2), or images (Experiments 3, 4a, 4b). A short-term testing effect was only observed for the image final test cues. These results do not provide strong support for the fuzzy trace explanation of the testing effect.

KEYWORDS:

• Testing effect
• semantic processing
• recognition memory
• retrieval practice
• fuzzy trace theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Carpenter (2011) and Rawson, Vaughn, and Carpenter (2015) have also used semantic final test cues yet within a cued-recall setting, which differs from the recognition memory framework that is of interest in the current study.

2 Due to a few programming errors, the numbers of targets and distractors were not always equal, and also slightly differed across test sessions and experiments.

3 Following Kline (2004, Chapter 3) and Cumming (2014), we use the term “statistically” instead of “‘significantly”, because the latter is often erroneously understood as meaning “important”.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek [grant number 411-10-912].