The spacing effect in older and younger adults: does context matter?

Age-related memory change has been a topic of much investigation in recent years, including spacing benefits and reliance on contextual cues. We manipulated the spacing schedule and the context of learning and observed the effects on long-term recall ability in healthy older and younger adults. After learning Swahili–English word pairs, half practiced immediately (massed) and half practiced 24 h later (spaced) either in the same room or a different room (context) from the initial session. A final recall test 10 days after the practice session occurred in the same room as the first session. Participants in the spaced condition remembered more than those in the massed condition 10 days later. Younger adults remembered more word pairs than older adult participants. Context change eliminated the spacing benefit for both age groups.     

Distinct episodic contexts enhance retrieval-based learning

Spaced retrieval practice results in better long-term retention than massed retrieval practice. The episodic context account of this effect suggests that updated representations of the more distinct temporal contexts associated with spaced retrievals facilitate later recall. We examined whether environmental context, in addition to temporal context, may also play a role in retrieval-based learning. Participants studied and then attempted to retrieve the English translations of Swahili words during four acquisition blocks of trials. They were then randomly assigned to practice retrieving items three more times in one of the following conditions: massed practice with the same environmental context scene; massed practice with different environmental context scenes; spaced practice with the same environmental context scene; or spaced practice with different environmental context scenes. After a one-week delay, measures of recall, forgetting, and the joint probabilities between study session recall and final recall performance all indicated enhanced retention for both the spaced and different environmental context conditions. Indeed, after retrieving items in the study session, forgetting them during final recall was 371% more likely in the same context than in the different context conditions. These findings redefine and refine previous accounts of the episodic context model of retrieval-based learning.     

Does mediator use contribute to the spacing effect for cued recall? Critical tests of the mediator hypothesis

When study is spaced across sessions (versus massed within a single session), final performance is greater after spacing. This spacing effect may have multiple causes, and according to the mediator hypothesis, part of the effect can be explained by the use of mediator-based strategies. This hypothesis proposes that when study is spaced across sessions, rather than massed within a session, more mediators will be generated that are longer lasting and hence more mediators will be available to support criterion recall. In two experiments, participants were randomly assigned to study paired associates using either a spaced or massed schedule. They reported strategy use for each item during study trials and during the final test. Consistent with the mediator hypothesis, participants who had spaced (as compared to massed) practice reported using more mediators on the final test. This use of effective mediators also statistically accounted for some – but not all of – the spacing effect on final performance.     

Spacing effects in real‐world classroom vocabulary learning

As a primary goal, educators often strive to maximize the amount of information pupils remember. In the lab, psychologists have found efficient memory strategies for retaining school‐related materials. One such strategy is the spacing effect, a memory advantage that occurs when learning is distributed across time instead of crammed into a single study session. Spaced learning is not often explicitly utilized in actual classrooms, perhaps due to a paucity of research in applied settings and with school‐aged children. The current study examined the spacing effect in real‐world fifth‐grade classrooms. We taught 39 children unfamiliar English words using both massed and spaced learning. Five weeks later, we tested vocabulary recall. One‐week spacing produced superior long‐term retention compared to massed learning. This finding demonstrates that the spacing effect can be generalized to vocabulary learning in applied settings and middle‐school‐aged children. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Distributed rereading can hurt the spacing effect in text memory

The spacing effect refers to the commonly observed phenomenon that memory for spaced repetitions is better than for massed repetitions. In the present study, we examined this effect in students' memory for a lengthy expository text. Participants read the text twice, either in immediate succession (massed repetition), with a 4‐day interstudy interval (spaced short), or with a 3.5‐weeks interstudy interval (spaced long). Two days after the second study trial, all participants were tested. The results demonstrated that students in the spaced‐short condition remembered more of the content than those in the massed condition. By contrast, students in the spaced‐long condition remembered as much as students in the massed condition. These results were interpreted in terms of a theoretical framework, which combines mechanisms of encoding variability and study‐phase retrieval to account for the spacing effect. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Spreading the words: A spacing effect in vocabulary learning

The spacing effect refers to the frequently observed finding that distributing learning across time leads to better retention than massing it into one single study session. In the present study, we examined whether the spacing effect generalises to primary school vocabulary learning. To this aim, children from Grade 3 were taught the meaning of 15 new words using a massed procedure and 15 other new words using a spaced procedure. The 15 words in the massed condition were divided into three sets of five words, and each set was taught three times in one of three learning sessions. In the spaced condition, learning was distributed across the three sessions: All 15 words were practised once in each of the three learning sessions. At the retention tests after 1 week and after 5 weeks we observed that the meaning of spaced words was remembered better than the meaning of massed words.     

Spacing Simultaneously Promotes Multiple Forms of Learning in Children's Science Curriculum

The spacing effect refers to the robust finding that long‐term memory is promoted when learning events are distributed in time rather than massed in immediate succession. The current study extended research on the spacing effect by examining whether spaced learning schedules can simultaneously promote multiple forms of learning, such as memory and generalization, in the context of an educational intervention. Thirty‐six early elementary school‐aged children were presented with science lessons on one of three schedules: massed, clumped, and spaced. At a 1‐week delayed test, children in the spaced condition demonstrated improvements in both memory and generalization, significantly outperforming children in the other conditions. However, there was no observed relationship between children's memory performance and generalization performance. The current study highlights directions for future research and contributes to a growing body of work demonstrating the benefits of spaced learning for educational curriculum. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Spacing one's study: evidence for a metacognitive control strategy

This article investigated individual control of spacing strategies during study. Three predictions were outlined: The spacing hypothesis suggests that people choose to space their study to improve long-term learning via the spacing effect. The massing hypothesis suggests that people choose to mass their study because of illusions of confidence during study. The metacognitive hypothesis suggests that people control their spacing schedules as a function of their metacognitive judgments of specific to-be-learned items. To test these hypotheses, the authors asked participants to study and make judgments of learning for cue-target pairs. Then, participants were given three choices; they could study the pair again immediately (massed), study the pair again after the entire list had been presented (spaced), or choose not to restudy (done). Results supported a metacognitively controlled spacing strategy-people spaced items that were judged to be relatively easy but massed items that were judged as relatively difficult.     

Application of the testing and spacing effects to name learning

Four experiments investigated the effects of testing and spacing on the learning of face‐name stimulus‐response pairs. Experiments 1a and 1b compared the recall of names following intervening tests versus additional study opportunities and found that testing produced better retention of names. Experiments 2 and 3 explored the effects of repeated tests versus study for massed, uniform, or expanded spacing intervals. Tested names were better retained than studied names, spaced names were better retained than massed names, and memory was best for items tested at spaced intervals. Contrary to past findings, expanded schedules did not yield better memory than uniform schedules in either experiment. Theoretical implications for the testing and spacing effects are discussed, along with effective name‐learning techniques based on these principles. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Encoding richness of self-generated elaboration and spacing effects on incidental memory

The present study investigated encoding variability in self-generated elaboration on incidental memory as a function of the type of presentation which was either massed or spaced. The subjects generated different answers to a "why" question for the first and the second presentations of a target sentence in a self-generated elaboration condition. In an experimenter-provided elaboration condition they then rated the appropriateness of the different answers provided by the experimenter for the first and second presentations. This procedure was followed by two free recall tests, one of which was immediate and the other delayed. A self-generated elaboration effect was observed in both the spaced and the massed presentations. These results indicated that the self-generated elaboration effect was facilitated, even in the massed presentation because the different answers to the first and the second presentations led to a richer encoding of each target.     

Avoidance of overlearning characterises the spacing effect

The spacing of a fixed amount of study time across multiple sessions usually increases subsequent test performance—a finding known as the spacing effect. In the spacing experiment reported here, subjects completed multiple learning trials, and each included a study phase and a test. Once a subject achieved a perfect test, the remaining learning trials within that session comprised what is known as overlearning. The number of these overlearning trials was reduced when learning trials were spaced across multiple sessions rather than massed in a single session. In addition, the degree to which spacing reduced overlearning predicted the size of the spacing effect, which is consistent with the possibility that spacing increases subsequent recall by reducing the occurrence of overlearning. By this account, overlearning is an inefficient use of study time, and the efficacy of spacing depends at least partly on the degree to which it reduces the occurrence of overlearning.     

Motivational properties of spaced food presentation in hungry rats: Long-lasting effects on drinking and eating

Hungry rats were given 60 food pellets either at spaced intervals or massed in one or two presentations, or no food, followed by a consumption test in the home cage. Drinking was higher after spaced food sessions than after massed food or no food sessions (Experiments 1, 2, 3, and 5) and higher after the presentation of standard food pellets than after quinine-flavored pellets (Experiment 2). An effect of spacing was found even with a delay of 1 hr between the end of the food session and the drinking test (Experiment 3). Spaced food presentation also produced an increase in the consumption of quinine-flavored food pellets after the end of the session (Experiment 4). These results suggest that the enhancement of behavior caused by intermittent reinforcement cannot be attributed entirely to the short-term eliciting effects of the reinforcer or to its thirst-inducing properties.     

At the same time or apart in time? The role of presentation timing and retrieval dynamics in generalization

Several bodies of research have found different results with regard to presentation timing, categorization, and generalization. Both presenting instances at the same time (simultaneous) and presenting instances apart in time (spacing) have been shown to facilitate generalization. In this study, we resolved these results by examining simultaneous, massed, and spaced presentations in 2-year-old children's (N = 144) immediate and long-term performance on a novel noun generalization task. Results revealed that, when tested immediately, children in the simultaneous condition outperformed children in all other conditions. However, when tested after 15 min, children in the spaced condition outperformed children in all other conditions. Results are discussed in terms of how retrieval dynamics during learning affect abstraction, retention, and generalization across time.     

Influence of the spacing of trait information on impressions of likability

Five experiments were conducted in which subjects were shown lists of trait adjectives that supposedly described particular individuals. Each list included both positive and negative traits, with all such traits occurring twice. The second occurrence of a trait followed the first either immediately (massed presentation) or after four other traits intervened (distributed presentation). For a given list, all positive traits received massed presentation and all negative traits were distributed, or vice versa. After list presentation, subjects judged how likable the person described would be. In Experiments 1–3 only, there was also a free recall test for the traits. The free recall test revealed both a spacing effect (distributed items being recalled better than massed) and a bias toward recalling negative traits better than positive. Likability judgments paralleled the recall pattern, with the judgments being more positive when positive traits were distributed (and negative massed), than in the opposite arrangement. Correlations calculated between recall and impressions were mostly nonsignificant, however, suggesting that judgments were not based on the recall of specific traits and that inferences formed at encoding were of primary importance.     

The spacing effect in children's memory and category induction

The spacing effect describes the robust phenomenon whereby memory is enhanced when learning events are distributed, instead of being presented in succession. We investigated the effect of spacing on children's memory and category induction. Three-year-old children were presented with two tasks, a memory task and a category induction task. In the memory task, identical instances of an object were presented and then tested in a multiple choice test. In the category induction task, different instances of a category were presented and tested in a multiple choice test. In both tasks, presenting the instances in a spaced sequence resulted in more learning than presenting the instances in a massed sequence, despite the difficulty created by the spaced sequence. The spaced sequence increased the difficulty of the task by allowing children time to forget the previous instance during the spaced interval.     

Effects of spacing repetitions on children's memory

Two experiments examined the effect of spacing repetitions within a word list on the free recall performance of elementary school children. In the first experiment, spacing repetitions facilitated recall, and the function relating recall of repeated items to the spacing between repetitions was the same throughout the age range investigated (first, third, and sixth graders). But, the function for these elementary school children reached asymptote at a much shorter spacing than the function typically reported for adults. The second experiment was designed to test an encoding variability explanation of spaced-repetition effects in elementary school children. Results for both third- and sixth-grade children were consistent with the hypothesis that differential encoding of repetitions facilitates performance and that spaced repetitions are remembered better because they are more likely to be differentially encoded. A theoretical framework was discussed that may be able to encompass both these results and another finding in the literature which indicates that differential encoding can sometimes impair rather than facilitate children's memory performance.     

Interaction between amount and pattern of training in the induction of intermediate- and long-term memory for sensitization in aplysia

In Aplysia, three distinct phases of memory for sensitization can be dissociated based on their temporal and molecular features. A single training trial induces short-term memory (STM, lasting <30 min), whereas five trials delivered at 15-min intervals induces both intermediate-term memory (ITM, lasting >90 min) and long-term memory (LTM, lasting >24 h). Here, we explore the interaction of amount and pattern of training in establishing ITM and LTM by examining memory for sensitization after different numbers of trials (each trial = one tail shock) and different patterns of training (massed vs. spaced). Under spaced training patterns, two trials produced STM exclusively, whereas four or five trials each produced both ITM and LTM. Three spaced trials failed to induce LTM but did produce an early decaying form of ITM (E-ITM) that was significantly shorter and weaker in magnitude than the late-decaying ITM (L-ITM) observed after four to five trials. In addition, E-ITM was induced after three trials with both massed and spaced patterns of training. However, L-ITM and LTM after four to five trials require spaced training: Four or five massed trials failed to induce LTM and produced only E-ITM. Collectively, our results indicate that in addition to three identified phases of memory for sensitization—STM, ITM, and LTM—a unique temporal profile of memory, E-ITM, is revealed by varying either the amount or pattern of training.     

Detrimental influence of contextual change on spacing effects in free recall

Two experiments were conducted to determine the mechanism underlying the spacing effect in free-recall tasks. Participants were required to study a list containing once-presented words as well as massed and spaced repetitions. In both experiments, presentation background at repetition was manipulated. The results of Experiment 1 demonstrated that free recall was higher for massed items repeated in a different context than for massed items repeated in the same context, whereas free recall for spaced items was higher when repeated in the same context. Furthermore, a spacing effect was shown for words repeated in the same context, whereas an attenuated spacing effect was revealed for words repeated in a different context. These findings were replicated in Experiment 2 under a different presentation background manipulation. Both experiments seem to be most consistent with a model that combines the contextual variability and the study-phase retrieval mechanism to account for the spacing effect in free-recall tasks.     

Distributed and massed practice: from laboratory to classroom

The benefit to memory of spacing presentations of material is well established but lacks an adequate explanation and is rarely applied in education. This paper presents three experiments that examined the spacing effect and its application to education. Experiment 1 demonstrated that spacing repeated presentations of items is equally beneficial to memory for a wide range of ages, contrary to some theories. Experiment 2 introduced ‘clustered’ presentations as a more relevant control than massed, reflecting the fact that massed presentation of material is uncommon in education. The scheduling of clustered presentations was intermediate between massed and distributed, yet recall was no different than for massed. Experiment 3, a classroom‐based study, demonstrated the benefit of distributed over clustered teaching of reading through modification of the scheduling of everyday lessons. Thus, the effectiveness of teaching may be improved by increasing the degree to which lessons are distributed. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.