An Exploration of the Negative Effects of Repetition and Testing on Memory

A fundamental principle within human memory research is the idea that repetition (i.e. multiple presentations of a stimulus) and testing (i.e. preliminary recall tasks) both improve recall performance. However, recent evidence suggests that in certain conditions repetition and testing can actually decrease item recall (Peterson, 2011). This study sought to determine whether these negative effects of repetition and testing would be more appropriately accounted for in the context of an encoding explanation or a retrieval explanation – in other words, whether the cause for decreased performance was related to how efficiently items were encoded or how effectively relevant self-cues were used during the recall task. Two experiments were designed to test these explanations by using lists of rhyming cue-target word pairs (e.g. “Beg – Leg”) as stimuli. The target words of these pairs were organized pseudo-randomly in some phases and categorically in others. The ordering of these phases was intended to direct what relational information would be most salient – with initial pseudo-randomized ordering, within-pair (rhyming) similarities should be more apparent, and with initial categorical ordering, between-pair (categorical) similarities should be more easily noticed. Results of the experiments support an encoding account for the negative repetition effect, but a retrieval explanation for the negative testing effect.