The benefits and costs of repeated testing on the learning of face-name pairs in healthy older adults.

We compared the benefits of repeated testing and repeated study on cued recall of unfamiliar face-name pairs in healthy middle-aged and older adults. We extended Karpicke and Roediger's (2008) paradigm to compare the effects of repeated study versus repeated testing after each face-name pair was correctly recalled once. The results from Experiment 1, which provided no feedback during the acquisition phase, yielded a crossover interaction: Middle-aged adults showed the expected benefit of repeated testing, whereas older adults produced a benefit of repeated study. When participants were given feedback in Experiment 2, both middle-aged and older adults benefited from repeated testing. We suggest that for face-name pairs, feedback may be particularly important for individuals who have relatively poor memory to produce benefits from repeated testing.