Healy Alice F, Schneider Vivian I, Kole James A
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO 80309-0345, USA.
School of Psychological Sciences, University of Northern Colorado, Greeley, CO 80639, USA.
Behav Sci (Basel). 2025 May 17;15(5):692. doi: 10.3390/bs15050692.
Four previous and two new experiments from our laboratory are reported, in which college students learned associations between French and English words in a learning phase and then took an immediate retention test. One week later, a delayed test was followed by relearning. Four difficulty manipulations were used during learning: blocking versus mixing semantic categories, translation direction, prelearning, and set size. The first new experiment examined the effect of set size on retention, and the second new experiment examined blocking and mixing semantic categories, as well as translation direction, on learning new vocabulary (transfer). Generally, across the six experiments, difficult conditions provided a disadvantage during learning and immediate testing, but made no difference or provided an advantage during relearning and delayed testing. These results suggest that making the initial learning more difficult does not always lead to superior retention.
本文报告了我们实验室之前的四项以及两项新的实验。在这些实验中，大学生在学习阶段学习法语和英语单词之间的联想，然后立即进行记忆测试。一周后，进行延迟测试，随后是重新学习。在学习过程中使用了四种难度操纵：语义类别分组与混合、翻译方向、预学习和组块大小。第一项新实验研究了组块大小对记忆的影响，第二项新实验研究了语义类别分组与混合以及翻译方向对学习新词汇（迁移）的影响。总体而言，在这六项实验中，困难条件在学习和即时测试期间带来劣势，但在重新学习和延迟测试期间没有差异或带来优势。这些结果表明，使初始学习更困难并不总是能带来更好的记忆效果。
