Kornell and Bjork (Psychological Science 19:585-592, 2008) found that interleaving exemplars of different categories enhanced inductive learning of the concepts based on those exemplars. They hypothesized that the benefit of mixing exemplars from different categories is that doing so highlights differences between the categories. Kang and Pashler (Applied Cognitive Psychology 26:97-103, 2012) obtained results consistent with this discriminative-contrast hypothesis: Interleaving enhanced inductive learning, but temporal spacing, which does not highlight category differences, did not. We further tested the discriminative-contrast hypothesis by examining the effects of interleaving and spacing, as well as their combined effects. In three experiments, using photographs of butterflies and birds as the stimuli, temporal spacing was harmful when it interrupted the juxtaposition of interleaved categories, even when total spacing was held constant, supporting the discriminative-contrast hypothesis. Temporal spacing also had value, however, when it did not interrupt discrimination processing.Keywords Categorization . Induction . Interleaving . Spacing . MetacognitionPeople accumulate a great deal of knowledge via inductive learning. Children, for example, learn concepts such as boat or fruit by being exposed to exemplars of those categories and inducing the commonalities that define the concepts.Later in life, we might learn to distinguish between different species of butterflies or birds, as in the present research. Such inductive learning is critical in making sense of events, objects, and actions-and, more generally, in structuring and understanding our world. In the present research, we examined how exemplars of to-be-learned categories should be sequenced and spaced in order to optimize inductive learning. Kornell and Bjork (2008) investigated the effect of study schedules on inductive learning-specifically, learning artists' painting styles from exemplars of their paintings. Images of six paintings by each of 12 artists were presented for study, with the artist's name displayed below each painting. The paintings by half of the artists were blocked (i.e., all six paintings by a given artist were shown consecutively), whereas the paintings by the other six artists were interleaved (i.e., mixed together). After the learning phase, participants were shown new paintings by each of the 12 artists and were asked to identify which artist had painted each new painting. Kornell and Bjork found that interleaving artists' paintings led to better performance on this inductive task than did blocking-even though participants consistently believed that blocking, rather than interleaving, had been more helpful for learning the artists' styles.

We previously showed that when rats were trained to fear an auditory conditioned stimulus (CS) by pairing it with a mild unilateral shock to the eyelid (the unconditioned stimulus, or US), conditioned freezing depended upon the amygdala contralateral but not ipsilateral from the US. It was proposed that convergent activation of amygdala neurons by the CS and US occurred mainly in the amygdala contralateral from US delivery, causing memories of the CS-US association to be stored primarily by that hemisphere. In the present study, we further tested this interpretation by administering unilateral infusions of U0126 (in 50% DMSO vehicle) to block phosphorylation of extracellullar signal-responsive kinase (ERK) in the amygdala prior to CS-US pairings. Conditioned freezing was impaired 24 h after training when U0126 was infused contralaterally-but not ipsilaterally-from the US, suggesting that fear memories were consolidated mainly by the contralateral amygdala. However, immunostaining experiments revealed that ERK phosphorylation was elevated in both hemispheres of the amygdala's lateral (LA) and centrolateral (CeL) nuclei after paired (but not unpaired) presentations of the CS and US. Thus, fear acquisition induced ERK phosphorylation bilaterally in the amygdala, even though the ipsilateral hemisphere did not appear to participate in conditioned freezing. These findings suggest that associative plasticity may occur in both amygdala hemispheres even when only one hemisphere is involved in freezing behavior. Conditioning-induced ERK phosphorylation was identical in both hemispheres of LA, but was slightly greater in the contralateral than ipsilateral hemisphere of CeL. Hence, asymmetric induction of plasticity in CeL might help to explain why conditioned freezing depends preferentially upon the amygdala contralateral from the US in our fear conditioning paradigm.

ABSTRACT1. Mobilizing marine conservation on a global scale is a tremendous challenge, especially as it involves motivating people who may have no physical connection to marine areas to experience and understand them.2. Game technology through virtual means, enables players anywhere at anytime, to explore areas they may not otherwise experience, and experience numerous scenarios for the benefit of global engagement in marine conservation action.3. New game platforms are being developed to teach science, and better connect people to nature, specifically marine environments.4. Infinite Scuba enables players to explore the ocean virtually with Mission Blue Founder, Sylvia Earle. 5. Planet3 is developing a game that will present marine and freshwater ecosystems in the greater context of the Earth system. 6. Games have the potential to play a key role in mobilizing knowledge and conservation action in the future.

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