The present study examined the utility of using spaced learning trials (when trials are distributed over time) versus massed learning trials (consecutive learning trials) in the acquisition of everyday functional tasks. In a within-subjects design, 20 participants with multiple sclerosis (MS) and 18 healthy controls (HC) completed two route learning tasks and two paragraph reading tasks. One ta...

The authors performed a meta-analysis of the distributed practice effect to illuminate the effects of temporal variables that have been neglected in previous reviews. This review found 839 assessments of distributed practice in 317 experiments located in 184 articles. Effects of spacing (consecutive massed presentations vs. spaced learning episodes) and lag (less spaced vs. more spaced learning...

Memory performance depends not only on effective learning and storage of information, but also on its efficient retrieval. In Drosophila, aversive olfactory conditioning generates qualitatively different forms of memory depending on the number and spacing of conditioning trials. However, it is not known how these differences are reflected at the retrieval level, in the behavior of individual fl...

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...

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...