Retrieval practice relative to restudy of learned material typically attenuates time-dependent forgetting. A recent study examining this testing effect across 12-h delays filled with nocturnal sleep versus daytime wakefulness, however, showed that sleep directly following encoding benefited recall of restudied but not of retrieval practiced items, which reduced, and even eliminated, the testing effect after sleep (Bäuml, Holterman, & Abel, 2014). The present study investigated, in 4 experiments, whether this modulating role of sleep for the testing effect is influenced by two factors that have previously been shown to increase the testing effect: corrective feedback and prolonged retention intervals. Experiments 1a and 1b applied 12-h delays and showed benefits of sleep for recall after both restudy and retrieval practice with feedback, but not after retrieval practice without feedback. Experiments 2a and 2b applied 24-h or 7-day delays and failed to observe any long-lasting benefits of sleep directly after encoding, on both restudied and retrieval practiced items. These results indicate that both corrective feedback and prolonged retention intervals reduce the modulating role of sleep for the testing effect as it can be observed after 12-h delays and in the absence of corrective feedback, which suggests a fairly limited influence of sleep on the effect. (PsycINFO Database Record
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.