Department of Psychology, Washington University.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2013 Sep;39(5):1417-32. doi: 10.1037/a0032184. Epub 2013 Apr 8.
A robust finding in the literature is that spacing material leads to better retention than massing; however, the benefit of spacing for concept learning is less clear. When items are massed, it may help the learner to discover the relationship between instances, leading to better abstraction of the underlying concept. Two experiments addressed this question through a typical function learning task in which subjects were trained via presentations of input points (cue values) for which output responses (criterion values) were required. Subjects were trained either using spaced points, strategically massed points (points were paired in training such that they occurred on the same side of the underlying V-shaped function), or randomly massed points (points were randomly paired during training). All subjects were then tested on repeated training points, new (interpolation) points within the training range, and extrapolation points that fell outside the training range. Spacing led to superior interpolation and extrapolation performance, with random massing leading to the worst performance on all test trial types. These results suggest that, at least for function concepts, massed training is not superior to spaced training for concept learning.
文献中有一个强有力的发现，即间隔材料比集中材料更能促进记忆保留；然而，间隔对于概念学习的益处并不那么明显。当项目集中呈现时，它可能有助于学习者发现实例之间的关系，从而更好地抽象出潜在的概念。两个实验通过典型的函数学习任务来解决这个问题，在这个任务中，被试通过呈现输入点（提示值）进行训练，需要输出响应（标准值）。被试要么使用间隔点进行训练，要么使用策略性集中的点进行训练（在训练中，点被配对，使得它们出现在潜在 V 形函数的同一侧），要么使用随机集中的点进行训练（在训练过程中随机配对点）。然后，所有被试都在重复的训练点、训练范围内的新（插值）点和超出训练范围的外推点上进行测试。间隔训练导致了更好的插值和外推表现，而随机集中训练在所有测试试验类型中导致了最差的表现。这些结果表明，至少对于函数概念来说，集中训练并不优于间隔训练来促进概念学习。
