Spacing effect
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
In psychology, the spacing effect refers to the fact that humans and animals more easily remember or learn items in a list when they are studied a few times over a long period of time ("spaced presentation"), rather than studied repeatedly in a short period time ("massed presentation").
The phenomenon was first identified by Hermann Ebbinghaus; his detailed study of it was published in the 1885 book Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology. This robust phenomenon has been found in many explicit memory tasks such as free recall, recognition, cued-recall, and frequency estimation (for reviews see Crowder 1976; Greene, 1989).
Practically, this effect suggests that "cramming" (intense, last-minute studying) the night before an exam is not likely to be as effective as studying at intervals over a much longer span of time. However, the benefit of spaced presentations does not appear at short retention intervals; that is, at short retention intervals, massed presentations lead to better memory performance than spaced presentations.
Several possible explanations of the spacing effect have been offered. According to the deficient processing view, massed repetitions lead to deficient processing of the second presentation - that we simply do not pay much attention to the later presentations (Hintzman et al., 1973). However, according to the encoding variability view, spaced repetition is likely to entail some variability in presentation; under massed repetitions, however, the corresponding memory prepresentations are similar and relatively indiscriminable. The robustness of the phenomenon and its resistance to experimental manipulation have made empirical testing of its parameters difficult.
