In forward testing effects, taking a test enhances memory for subsequently studied material. These effects have been observed for previously studied and tested items, a potentially item-specific testing effect, and newly studied untested items, a purely generalized testing effect. We directly compared item-specific and generalized forward testing effects using procedures to separate testing benefits due to encoding versus retrieval. Participants studied two lists of Swahili-English word pairs, with the second study list containing "new" pairs intermixed with the previously studied "old" pairs. Participants completed a review phase in which they took a cued-recall test on only the "old" pairs or restudied them. In Experiments 1a, 1b, and 2, the review phase was given either before or after the second study list. Testing benefited memory to the same degree for both "new" and "old" pairs, suggesting that there were no pair-specific benefits of testing. The larger benefit from testing when review was given before rather than after the second study list suggests that the memory enhancement was due to both testing-enhanced encoding and testing-enhanced retrieval. To better equate generalized testing effects for "new" and "old" pairs, Experiment 3 intermixed them in the review phase. A statistically significant pair-specific testing effect for "old" items was now observed. Overall, these results show that forward testing effects are due to both testing-enhanced encoding and retrieval effects and that direct, pair-specific forward testing benefits are considerably smaller than indirect, generalized forward testing benefits.

Carpenter (2011) argued that the testing effect she observed for semantically related but associatively unrelated paired associates supports the mediator effectiveness hypothesis. This hypothesis asserts that after the cue-target pair is learned, relative to restudying mother-child, a review test in which is used to cue the recall of child leads to (a) greater activation of the mediator (), and (b) greater strengthening of the links in the cue-to-mediator () and mediator-to-target () associative chain. This chain is then spontaneously used for recalling child when mother is given as the cue in a final test. The mediator effectiveness hypothesis is supported by the finding that relative to review restudying, review testing leads to better recall of the target child in the final test when cued by either or . The present Experiment 1 examined an alternative account of this testing effect for mediator-to-target recall. By this account, when given as a cue, the mediator elicits the original cue, which in turn covertly cues the target via a test-strengthened cue-target association. Contrary to this account, the mediator-to-target testing effect did not depend on the preexisting mediator-cue associative strength. Experiment 2 provided a more direct test of the mediator effectiveness hypothesis by having participants recall the mediator and then the target in the final test. Contrary to predictions made by the mediator effectiveness hypothesis, (a) the cue-to-target testing effect was of the same magnitude whether the mediator was recalled or not, and (b) overall target recall was lower, not higher, when participants recalled the mediator. Thus, spontaneous mediation does not underlie the testing effect that occurs for semantically related but associatively unrelated paired associates. (PsycINFO Database Record

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