Effects of recall tests on long-term retention of paired associates

Abstract

Forty Ss were given 5 or 10 paired-presentation training trials on paired-associate items followed immediately by 0, 1, or 5 unreinforced recall tests. The effects of the immediate test trials were to increase substantially long-term retention, as measured either by error frequency or response latency, to increase stereotypy of both correct and incorrect responses, and to reduce the frequency of intrusion relative to confusion errors. These findings were interpreted in terms of a distinction between storage and retrieval processes, the formation of associations being assumed to occur upon training trials and the availability, or retrievability, of the response members of items to increase as a function of occurrences on test trials.

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