Memory & Cognition

Researchers in learning and memory have frequently reported effects of task and context on retention. Verbal materials are remembered better if they are initially gen-erated by the subject than if they are merely perceived by the subject (Slamecka & Graf, 1978), and actively gen-erated movements have been found to be remembered more accurately than passive movements (Hall & Leav-itt, 1977; Marteniuk, 1973; Roy, 1978). Memory for ver-bal material presented in the auditory modality during learning has been reported to be superior to that for ma-terial presented visually (Mowbray & Gebhard, 1958; Murray et al., 1999; Penney, 1989). Craik and Lockhart (1972) and Craik and Tulving (1975) demonstrated that memory for visually presented words was superior when the orienting task during learning was to answer a se-mantic question (e.g., “Does the word refer to an ani-mal?”) than when the task was a question relating to or-thography or rhyme. Such studies emphasized conditions during learning and paid little attention to retrieval processes. However, subsequent work in both verbal and motor learning has focused on the interaction of conditions at learning with conditions at test, providing evidence that retention (per-formance at test) is best when conditions (task or con-text) are the same at learning and test; we will call such an interaction a “matching effect. ” Verbal retrieval is fa-cilitated when the external environment at learning is re