Classroom exams can assess students' knowledge of only a subset of the material taught in a course. What are the implications of this approach for long-term retention? Three experiments (N = 210) examined how taking an initial test affects later memory for prose materials not initially tested. Experiment 1 shows that testing enhanced recall 24 hr later for the initially nontested material. This facilitation was not seen for participants given additional study opportunities without initial testing. Experiment 2 extends this facilitative effect to a within-subjects design. Experiment 3 demonstrates that this facilitation can be modulated by conscious strategies. These results have implications for educational practice and the theoretical developments of the testing effect, associative memory, and retrieval inhibition.

During the past decade, a large body of research has shown that memory traces can become labile upon retrieval and must be restabilized. Critically, interrupting this reconsolidation process can abolish a previously stable memory. Although a large number of studies have demonstrated this reconsolidation associated amnesia in nonhuman animals, the evidence for its occurrence in humans is far less compelling, especially with regard to declarative memory. In fact, reactivating a declarative memory often makes it more robust and less susceptible to subsequent disruptions. Here we show that existing declarative memories can be selectively impaired by using a noninvasive retrieval–relearning technique. In six experiments, we show that this reconsolidation-associated amnesia can be achieved 48 h after formation of the original memory, but only if relearning occurred soon after retrieval. Furthermore, the amnesic effect persists for at least 24 h, cannot be attributed solely to source confusion and is attainable only when relearning targets specific existing memories for impairment. These results demonstrate that human declarative memory can be selectively rewritten during reconsolidation.

Remembering events from one's past (i.e., episodic memory) and envisioning specific events that could occur in one's future (i.e., episodic future thought) invoke highly overlapping sets of brain regions. The present study employed functional magnetic resonance imaging to test the hypothesis that one source of this shared architecture is that episodic future thought—much like episodic memory—tends to invoke memory for known visual–spatial contexts. That is, regions of posterior cortex (within posterior cingulate cortex [PCC], parahippocampal cortex [PHC], and superior occipital gyrus [SOG]) elicit indistinguishable activity during remembering and episodic future thought, and similar regions have been identified as important for establishing visual–spatial contextual associations. In the present study, these regions were similarly engaged when participants thought about personal events in familiar contexts, irrespective of temporal direction (past or future). The same regions, however, exhibited very little activity when participants envisioned personal future events in unfamiliar contextual settings. These findings suggest that regions within PCC, PHC, and SOG support the activation of well-known contextual settings that people tend to imagine when thinking about personal events, whether in the past or future. Hence, this study pinpoints an important similarity between episodic future thought and episodic memory.

The testing effect, or the finding that taking an initial test improves subsequent memory performance, is a robust and reliable phenomenon--as long as the final test involves recall. Few studies have examined the effects of taking an initial recall test on final recognition performance, and results from these studies are equivocal. In 3 experiments, we attempt to demonstrate that initial testing can change the ways in which later recognition decisions are executed even when no difference can be detected in the recognition hit rates. Specifically, initial testing was shown to enhance later recollection but leave familiarity unchanged. This conclusion emerged from three dependent measures: source memory, exclusion performance, and remember/know judgments.