Spaced practise shows similar patterns of improvement for visual acuity and vocabulary learning Z Sosic-Vasic1, J Kornmeier2 |
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1Abt. Psychiatrie und Psychotherapie III, Universitätsklinikum Ulm, Germany |
| Temporally distributed (“spaced”) learning can be twice as efficient as massed learning. This “spacing effect” occurs in humans of different ages and in animals, with different learning materials and even with visual acuity test performance. We tested the dependence of both visual acuity performance and vocabulary learning on spacing interval duration. Six groups of participants performed visual acuity tests (gap detection) and learned Japanese -German vocabulary (word associations) with different spacing intervals between practise units (from 7 min to 24 h). Three final tests were executed at “retention intervals” of one, seven and 28 days after the last practice unit. Spacing effects occurred for both tasks with maxima at 20 min and 12 h: In the 12-h-spacing group the gain of visual acuity and about 92 % of the learned words were retained after four weeks. In the 24-h-spacing group, in contrast, the visual acuity gain dropped to zero and more than 60 % of the learned words were forgotten. The very similar patterns of results across the very different practice domains indicate similar underlying mechanisms. Further, the nonlinearity pattern of the spacing effect point to separate steps to establishing long-term memory. |
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