IMPORTANCE Repeated and deliberate practice is crucial in surgical skills training, and virtual reality (VR) simulation can provide self-directed training of basic surgical skills to meet the individual needs of the trainee. Assessment of the learning curves of surgical procedures is pivotal in understanding skills acquisition and best-practice implementation and organization of training. OBJ...

OBJECTIVES/HYPOTHESIS Cognitive load theory states that working memory is limited. This has implications for learning and suggests that reducing cognitive load (CL) could promote learning and skills acquisition. This study aims to explore the effect of repeated practice and simulator-integrated tutoring on CL in virtual reality (VR) mastoidectomy simulation. STUDY DESIGN Prospective trial. ...

NETtalk is a massively-parallel network that learns to convert English text to phonemes. In NETtalk, the memory representations are shared among many processing units, and these representations are learned by practice. In humans, distributed practice is more effective for longterm retention than massed practice, and we wondered whether learning in NETtalk had similar properties. NETtalk was tes...

Recent studies have suggested that pupil diameter, like the "old-new" ERP, may be a measure of memory. Because the amplitude of the old-new ERP is enhanced for items encoded in the context of repetitions that are distributed (spaced), compared to massed (contiguous), we investigated whether pupil diameter is similarly sensitive to repetition. Emotional and neutral pictures of natural scenes wer...

This study investigated how 3-D and 2-D computer game practice and delivery as well as individual differences affect performance on two tests of mental rotation (Vandenberg Mental Rotation Test and Card Rotation Test). Sixty-one US undergraduates from the Midwest completed 4 h of either massed or distributed practice. While computer game practice improved mental rotation scores in general, wome...