Some effects of remembering on forgetting

Abstract

Three experiments investigated the effect of testing for recall on forgetting. One experiment demonstrated that the effect of testing is restricted to the items tested. A second experiment showed that the difference between tested and untested items increased with longer retention intervals. Increasing the study time had no effect on the retention of tested items, but increased the recallability of untested items. A third experiment ruled out rehearsal during the retention interval as an explanation. It was concluded that the critical aspects of a test are the retrieval operations themselves. Suggestions are made as to how these operations attenuate forgetting. © 1983 Psychonomic Society, Inc.