Recent research demonstrates a spacing effect in inductive learning. Spacing different individual exemplars apart in time, rather than massing them together, aids in the learning of categories. Experiment 1 examined whether it is interleaving or temporal spacing that is critical to the spacing effect in the situation wherethe memory load is high, and the results favored interleaving. Experiment 2 examined the effect of the difficulty of the category discrimination on presentation style (massed vs. spaced) in inductive learning, and the results demonstrated that spacing (i.e., interleaving of exemplars from different categories) is advantageous for lowdiscriminabilty categories, whereas massing is more effective for high-discriminability categories. In contrast to these performance measures, massing was judged by participants to be more effective than spacing in both discriminability conditions, even when performance for low-discriminability categories showed the opposite.Keywords Spacing effect . Inductive learning . Category learning . Category induction . Category discrimination It has long been known that repetitions of items further apart in time produce better memory than do repetitions close together in

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Purpose – The present study investigated whether or not the benefits of interleaving of exemplars from several categories vary with retention interval in inductive learning.   Methodology – Two experiments were conducted using paintings (Experiment 1) and textual materials (Experiment 2), and the experiments used a mixed factorial design. Forty students participated in each experiment for course credit. In each experiment, participants studied a series of exemplars from several categories which were presented massed and interleaved, and later their induction was tested either shortly after the study phase (short-term retention) or after a week’s delay (long- term retention).   Findings – Consistent with findings from previous studies, the interleaving effect was found in the short-term retention condition, and crucially, the present study provided the initial evidence that interleaving of exemplars also affected long-term retention. Interestingly, massing was judged to be more effective than spacing (interleaving) in most groups, even when actual performance showed the opposite.   Significance – The present study shows that interleaved exemplars have considerable potential in improving inductive learning in the long term. For example, induction is used in case-based reasoning which requires one to start with learning from specifi c cases, and then form generalizations of these cases by identifying the commonalities between them. In order to enhance long-term retention, educators may want to consider using interleaved presentation rather than massed presentation in teaching examples or cases from a particular category or concept.

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