Retrieval Practice and Context Reinstatement

Retrieval practice is a powerful learning strategy, but the mechanism(s) behind it are not fully understood. One account of this “testing effect” (i.e., enhanced memory for information that was previously retrieved vs. restudied) is the Episodic-Context Account (Karpicke et al., 2014). According to this theory, successful retrieval requires contextual reinstatement which updates the target memory representation to include features of the current test context along with features of the initial study context. The resulting composite trace provides varied contextual features that are more likely to match features during the final test than the representation in the restudy condition (which only contains features from initial study since no reinstatement occurred). However, the specific features necessary for reinstatement (and thus contributing to the testing effect) remain unclear. The current study was designed to clarify the nature of these features using a three-phase paradigm. In phase 1, participants studied words paired with different cues (phonemic vs. semantic) and presented in two different lists. The critical manipulation occurred in phase 2, where participants either: (1) restudied the words; (2) restudied the words and made cue discrimination judgments; (3) restudied the words and made list discrimination judgments; or (4) freely-recalled the words. In phase 3, a final recognition test assessed memory for the words and their initial contextual features (i.e., cue type and list number). Results will shed light on the contextual features necessary for reinstatement by comparing the features remembered in the retrieval condition to those remembered in the restudy plus feature discrimination conditions.