16. Abstract Student pilots or new air traffic controllers have two ways to learn to understand the noisy and distorted communications common to aircraft operations: they may learn as they are working on other aspects of the activity, or they may learn by devoting a continuous period of time to speech--intelligibility improvement. Work completed at this laboratory indicates that two listening s...

Long-lasting memories are formed when the stimulus is temporally distributed (spacing effect). However, the synaptic mechanisms underlying this robust phenomenon and the precise time course of the synaptic modifications that occur during learning remain unclear. Here we examined the adaptation of horizontal optokinetic response in mice that underwent 1 h of massed and spaced training at varying...

Are associative memories forgotten more quickly than item memories, and does the level of original learning differentially influence forgetting rates? In this study, we addressed these questions by having participants learn single words and word pairs once (Experiment 1), three times (Experiment 2), and six times (Experiment 3) in a massed learning (ML) or a distributed learning (DL) mode. Then...

Twenty-six sedentary, college-aged females were matched and randomly assigned to one of two groups. The massed group («=13) completed 15 maximal isometric elbow flexion strength trials in one session, while the distributed group («=13) performed five such contractions on three successive days. After a two-week and three month rest interval, both groups returned to perform another five maximal i...

OBJECTIVE To determine the effect of massed practice (MP) versus massed practice combined with somatosensory stimulation (MP+SS) on cortical plasticity and function in persons with incomplete tetraplegia. METHODS Ten subjects were assigned to either MP or MP+SS. Median nerve stimulation (500 ms train, 10 Hz, 1 ms pulse duration) was delivered at the intensity eliciting a motor threshold respo...

This study examined the effects of repetition and spacing of repetitions on amnesia patients' recognition and recall of a list of words. Like controls, amnesia patients recognized items better when repetitions were spaced compared with when they were massed. This finding was attributed to the additional rehearsal that distributed presentations typically encourage. Amnesia patients also showed n...

Considerable evidence supports the effectiveness of close comparison of examples as a means to promote the induction of schemas that support generalization, especially to novel cases that require far transfer. The ease of comparison would appear to be maximized by presenting the to-be-compared cases in close spatial and temporal proximity. However, findings from a number of recent studies have ...

The watermaze delayed matching-to-place (DMP) task was modified to include probe trials, to quantify search preference for the correct place. Using a zone analysis of search preference, a gradual decay of one-trial memory in rats was observed over 24 h with weak memory consistently detected at a retention interval of 6 h, but unreliably at 24 h. This forgetting function in the watermaze was sim...

Patients with chronic aphasia were assigned randomly to a group to receive either conventional aphasia therapy or constraint-induced (CI) aphasia therapy, a new therapeutic technique requiring intense practice over a relatively short period of consecutive days. CI aphasia therapy is realized in a communicative therapeutic environment constraining patients to practice systematically speech acts ...

The study of experimental extinction and of the spontaneous recovery of the extinguished memory could cast light on neurobiological mechanisms by which internal representations compete to control behavior. In this work, we use a combination of behavioral and molecular methods to dissect subprocesses of experimental extinction of conditioned taste aversion (CTA). Extinction of CTA becomes appare...