Concept learning with differing sequences of instances.

Kurtz, Kenneth H.; Hovland, Carl I.

doi:10.1037/h0040295

Cited by 69 publications

(64 citation statements)

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“…Although the present pattern of results seems inconsistent with prior studies of inductive learning that have demonstrated a benefit of blocked practice (Goldstone, 1996;Kurtz & Hovland, 1956;Whitman & Garner, 1963), the conceptual framework just described may offer an explanation of these apparently divergent results. In the present research, similarities within butterfly species (as illustrated in Fig.…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 99%

“…Intuitively, it might seem that studying a single category in a block would be beneficial, as learners would notice similarities within the category. Consistent with this idea, early studies showed that mixing exemplars from different categories resulted in poorer learning than did grouping exemplars of the same category (Kurtz & Hovland, 1956;Whitman & Garner, 1963). More recently, Goldstone (1996) found better performance when categories alternated on 25 % of the trials than when they alternated on 75 % of the trials-that is, less-frequent alternation appeared to produce more learning.…”

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Why interleaving enhances inductive learning: The roles of discrimination and retrieval

et al. 2012

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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.

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Section: Discussioncontrasting

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Why interleaving enhances inductive learning: The roles of discrimination and retrieval

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“…Past studies reporting benefits of interleaving used tasks that required discriminative contrast (e.g., Kornell & Bjork, 2008;Wahlheim et al, 2011), whereas the present task may have been more likely to require the analysis of shared features. The finding that interleaving impairs analysis of shared features is consistent with the findings of previous studies that have required participants to notice commonalities from diverse stimuli, such as line segments (e.g., Goldstone, 1996) and geometric patterns (e.g., Kurtz & Hovland, 1956). The present study confirms and extends these findings to a pronunciation learning task in which participants had to notice patterns in orthographic-to-phonological mapping.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 80%

The effects of interleaving versus blocking on foreign language pronunciation learning

Carpenter

Mueller

2013

Mem Cogn

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Many studies have shown that students learn better when they are given repeated exposures to different concepts in a way that is shuffled or interleaved, rather than blocked (e.g., Rohrer Educational Psychology Review, 24, 355-367, 2012). The present study explored the effects of interleaving versus blocking on learning French pronunciations. Native English speakers learned several French words that conformed to specific pronunciation rules (e.g., the long "o" sound formed by the letter combination "eau," as in bateau), and these rules were presented either in blocked fashion (bateau, carreau, fardeau . . . mouton, genou, verrou . . . tandis, verglas, admis) or in interleaved fashion (bateau, mouton, tandis, carreau, genou, verglas . . .). Blocking versus interleaving was manipulated within subjects (Experiments 1-3) or between subjects (Experiment 4), and participants' pronunciation proficiency was later tested through multiple-choice tests (Experiments 1, 2, and 4) or a recall test (Experiment 3). In all experiments, blocking benefited the learning of pronunciations more than did interleaving, and this was true whether participants learned only 4 words per rule (Experiments 1-3) or 15 words per rule (Experiment 4). Theoretical implications of these findings are discussed. Keywords Interleaving . Pronunciation learning . Discriminative contrastIn academic settings, students are often given multiple exposures to different concepts. Under typical conditions, a particular concept (e.g., conjugating foreign verbs in the present tense) is practiced over and over again before moving on to the next concept (e.g., conjugating foreign verbs in the past tense). However, recent evidence suggests that it may be more beneficial to present different concepts in an order that is shuffled and less predictable (e.g., practicing a present-tense conjugation followed by a past-tense conjugation, followed by more present-tense conjugations, etc.). For example, Rohrer and Taylor (2007) taught students to calculate the volume of 4 different types of solid figures. Students worked through practice problems in an order that was either blocked by type of figure (i.e., all problems pertaining to one type of figure were finished before the student moved on to the next type of figure) or interleaved such that the same problems appeared in an order that was shuffled and unpredictable. On a later test requiring students to calculate the volumes for similar types of figures, students scored higher if they had learned the information through interleaving, as compared with blocking.Other studies have reported benefits of interleaving on the learning of geometric concepts (e.g., Taylor & Rohrer, 2010) and algebraic rules (e.g., Mayfield & Chase, 2002). A small but growing number of studies has also reported benefits of interleaving for other types of cognitive and motor tasks as well (for reviews, see Dunlosky, Rawson, Marsh, Nathan, & Willingham, 2013;Rohrer, 2012). For example, Kornell and Bjork (2008) taught participants to classify...

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“…Providing support for this hypothesis, Kurtz and Hovland (1956) found that the induction of nonsense-syllable category labels from simple geometric-pattern exemplars was hastened by the successive, or blocked, presentation of relevant stimuli, as opposed to an intermixed, or interleaved, format in which two instances of a given concept were never presented consecutively. Likewise, benefits to induction of blocked rather than interleaved stimulus sequencing were found, to varying degrees, in examinations decades ago of positive and negative concept instances (Hovland & Weiss, 1953), miniature linguistic systems (Foss, 1968), shape triads (Detambel & Stolurow, 1956), and lowrelevance cues (Peterson, 1962).…”

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confidence: 86%

“…Furthermore, we wondered whether the contrast between all-interleaved and all-blocked exposure obscures the potential benefits of each at difference stages of induction. The primary question addressed in the present study pertained to the optimal distribution of to-beinduced information; hence, in our design we adopted Kurtz and Hovland's (1956) recommendation to compare degrees of interleaved presentation. We juxtaposed practice schedules in which sets of exemplar-category associations were either solved in succession (i.e., blocked), fully interleaved, or presented with a gradual transition from blocked to interleaved practice.…”

Section: Overview Of the Experimentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Blocking as a friend of induction in verbal category learning

Sorensen

2016

Mem Cogn

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We conducted an experiment to investigate the influences of interleaved versus blocked presentation of disparate verbal exemplars on the induction of category concepts. The practice schedules of four experimental groups were juxtaposed such that sets of exemplar-category associations were either solved in succession (i.e., blocked), systematically intermixed (i.e., interleaved), or presented with an incremental transition from blocked to interleaved practice. Counter to current trends in the literature, in which interleaving alone has been facilitative of induction in some tasks, we found that participants whose initial exposure to the category exemplars involved blocked presentation performed better in both implicit and explicit tests of concept learning. The results are discussed with respect to the impacts of task type, task difficulty, and exemplar relatedness on induction.

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Concept learning with differing sequences of instances.

Cited by 69 publications

References 5 publications

Why interleaving enhances inductive learning: The roles of discrimination and retrieval

Why interleaving enhances inductive learning: The roles of discrimination and retrieval

The effects of interleaving versus blocking on foreign language pronunciation learning

Blocking as a friend of induction in verbal category learning

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