The spacing effect in children’s memory and category induction

Vlach, Haley A.; Sandhofer, Catherine M.; Kornell, Nate

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2008.07.013

Cited by 136 publications

(188 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…However, there was little difference in the experiments in the objective amount of spacing between the immediate and delayed conditions for the children and that for the adults, since the experimental procedures and timing were similar for the two groups. Past research has shown that both groups benefit from spaced practice (Vlach, Sandhofer, & Kornell, 2008), but we could find no indication that the children benefitted more. Third, it had been thought (Kulik & Kulik, 1988) that studies conducted in the classroom might be different from those done in the laboratory.…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 85%

Delayed versus immediate feedback in children’s and adults’ vocabulary learning

2009

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Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 85%

Delayed versus immediate feedback in children’s and adults’ vocabulary learning

2009

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“…All of these findings seem to fit within an extensive literature on the spacing effect-that is, the finding that items studied once and restudied after a delay are recalled better in the long term than are items studied and restudied in quick succession (for reviews, see Cepeda, Pashler, Vul, Wixted, & Rohrer, 2006;Dempster, 1988;Glenberg, 1979). In all of the recent studies demonstrating the benefits of spacing for inductive learning (with the exception of Vlach et al, 2008, who did not have an interleaved condition in addition to their spaced condition), however, interleavingmixing exemplars from different categories together-was what enhanced learning, rather than temporal spacing per se-a point to which we will return shortly.…”

supporting

confidence: 71%

“…Kornell and Bjork's (2008) findings were replicated by Kornell, Castel, Eich, and Bjork (2010) with older adults as participants. Furthermore, Zulkiply, McLean, Burt, and Bath (2012) found similar results when their participants read case studies exemplifying different psychological disorders in an inductive-learning experiment, and Vlach, Sandhofer, and Kornell (2008) found similar results when three-yearold children learned the names of novel objects on the basis of induction. Additionally, Kornell and Bjork's results have been replicated by Kang and Pashler (2012), Zulkiply and Burt (in press), and Wahlheim, Dunlosky, and Jacoby (2011).…”

mentioning

confidence: 71%

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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“…Participants saw three exemplars for ten of the object categories seen in Experiments 1 and 2. We selected exemplars that only differed from each other in color, as this NOUN Database 22 is a common method for forming categories for experimental research (Golinkoff, Hirsh-Pasek, Bailey, & Wenger, 1992;Twomey et al, 2014;Vlach, Sandhofer, & Kornell, 2008;Woodward, Markman, & Fitzsimmons, 1994). These images were created in identical fashion to Experiment…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%