Samenvatting

Retrieval practice enhances long-term retention more than restudying; a phenomenon
called the testing effect. The fuzzy trace explanation predicts that a testing effect will
already emerge after a short interval when participants are solely provided with
semantic cues in the final test. In the present study, we assessed this explanation by
gradually reducing the surface features overlap between cues in the learning phase
and the final recognition test. In all five experiments, participants in the control/word
condition received as final test cues the same words as in the learning phase. The
experimental final test cues consisted of scrambled words, words in a new context,
scrambled words in a new context (Experiment 1), synonyms (Experiment 2), or images
(Experiments 3, 4a, 4b). A short-term testing effect was only observed for the image
final test cues. These results do not provide strong support for the fuzzy trace
explanation of the testing effect.