Depressive symptomatology and learning: Does intermediate testing or restudying the information determine long-term memory retrieval of novel symbols?

Abstract

IntroductionThere is a hypothesis in cognitive psychology that long-term memory retrieval is improved by intermediate testing than by restudying the information. The effect of testing has been investigated with the use of a variety of stimuli. However, almost all testing effect studies to date have used purely verbal materials such as word pairs, facts and prose passages.ObjectiveHere byzantine music symbol–word pairs were used as to-be-learned materials to demonstrate the generalisability of the testing effect to symbol learning in participants with and without depressive symptoms.MethodFifty healthy (24 women, M age = 26.20, SD = 5.64) and forty volunteers with high depressive symptomatology (20 women, M age = 27.00, SD = 1.04) were examined. The participants did not have a music education. The examination material was completely new for them: 16 byzantine music notation stimuli, paired with a verbal label (the ancient Greek name of the symbol). Half of the participants underwent intermediate testing and the others restudied the information in a balanced design.ResultsResults indicated that there were no statistically significant differences in final memory test performance after a retention interval of 5 minutes for both groups of participants with low and high level depressive symptomatology (P > 0.005). After a retention interval of a week, tested pairs were retained better than repeatedly studied pairs for high and low depressive symptomatology groups (P < 0.005).ConclusionsThis research suggests that the effect of testing time on later memory retrieval can also be obtained in byzantine symbol learning.Disclosure of interestThe authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.