Tacit within both lay and cognitive conceptualizations of learning is the notion that those conditions of learning that foster "good" retention do so by increasing both the probability and the speed of access to the relevant information. In 3 experiments, time pressure during recognition is shown to decrease accessibility more for words learned via elaborative rehearsal than for words learned via rote rehearsal, despite the fact that elaborative rehearsal is a more efficacious learning strategy

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... as measured by the probability of access. In Experiment 1, participants learned each word using both types of rehearsal, and the results show that access to the products of elaborative rehearsal is more compromised by time pressure than is access to the products of rote rehearsal. The results of Experiment 2, in which each word was learned via either pure rote or pure elaborative rehearsal, exhibit the same pattern. Experiment 3, in which the authors used the response-signal procedure, provides evidence that this difference in accessibility owes not to differences in the rate of access to the 2 types of traces, but rather to the higher asymptotic level of stored information for words learned via elaborative rehearsal. A ubiquitous notion in commonsense and scientific conceptualizations of learning and memory is that some forms of learning are better than others and, consequently, that memories vary along a unidimensional continuum of strength. Good learning, by whatever means, produces strong memories-information that is readily accessible and available for immediate use. Furthermore, a failure of memory is seen as the hallmark of imperfect learning-a standard used by any instructor who has ever administered an examination of his or her students' knowledge. A problem facing contemporary cognitive psychologists is how to reconcile this pervasive (and often valid) notion with the burgeoning set of results that provide evidence for important dissociations in learning and memory. These dissociations are in evidence in the language of cognitive psychology, in which we refer to implicit and explicit learning, episodic and semantic memory, and so forth. Such distinctions are also critical to influential ideas and concepts, such as transfer-appropriate processing (Morris, Bransford,