A basic question of instruction is how much students will actually learn from it. This paper presents an approach called learning decomposition, which determines the relative efficacy of different types of learning opportunities. This approach is a generalization of learning curve analysis, and uses non-linear regression to determine how to weight different types of practice opportunities relat...

Rats with lesions in either the fornix, the amygdala, or both were compared with control animals on the acquisition of three different concurrent object discrimination tasks. In the first task the animals received one trial per day on each of six pairs of stimulus objects ('spaced' condition). In the second task the animals received four trials per day on each of six stimulus pairs ('standard' ...

The sensory-motor neuron synapse of Aplysia is an excellent model system for investigating the biochemical changes underlying memory formation. In this system, training that is separated by rest periods (spaced training) leads to persistent changes in synaptic strength that depend on biochemical pathways that are different from those that occur when the training lacks rest periods (massed train...

Two-year-old children were taught either 6 novel nouns, 6 novel verbs, or 6 novel actions over 1 month. In each condition, children were exposed to some items in massed presentations (on a single day) and some in distributed presentations (over the 2 weeks). Children's comprehension and production was tested at 3 intervals after training. In comprehension, children learned all types of items in...

^*3^The major purpo»e of this study was nft discover the influence of intraliit similarity and intertrial interval on retention of serial adjectives. With regard to retention as a function of intralist similarity, several studies (4, 6, 7, 8) indicate that while intralist similarity may influence rate of learning, it has no influence on recall taken 24 hr. following learning. As yet, however, n...

Extinction of classically conditioned fear, like its acquisition, is active learning, but little is known about its molecular mechanisms. We recently reported that temporal massing of conditional stimulus (CS) presentations improves extinction memory acquisition, and suggested that temporal spacing was less effective because individual CS exposures trigger two opposing processes: (1) fear extin...

An exposure to stress can enhance memory for emotionally arousing experiences. The phenomenon is suggested to be amygdala-dependent and in accordance with that view the amygdala was found to modulate mnemonic processes in other brain regions. Previously, we illustrated increased amygdala activation and reduced activation of CA1 following spatial learning under higher versus lower stress conditi...

Emotionally charged experiences alter memory storage via the activation of hormonal systems. Previously, we have shown that compared with rats trained for a massed spatial learning task in the water maze in warm water (25 degrees C), animals that were trained in cold water (19 degrees C) performed better and showed higher levels of the stress hormone corticosterone. Here, we examined whether ma...