On Rest-from-Deliberate-Learning as a Mechanism for the Spacing Effect: Commentary on Chen et al. (2021)

The spacing effect in remote information-integration category learning

The present experiments examined whether the temporal distribution of procedural category learning experiences would impact learning outcomes. Participants completed the remote category learning experiments on a smartphone in one of two learning conditions: massed or distributed. Consistent with expectations, distributed learners in both experiments reached higher accuracy levels than massed learners. In Experiment 1 the effect disappeared after accounting for reaction time differences, suggesting that it was driven by attentional mechanisms. In Experiment 2, the spacing advantage was only present for previously studied items during a post-learning test, suggesting a role of consolidation. In both experiments, it seems likely that temporal spacing helped participants discover the optimal information-integration categorization strategy. These results suggest that adult category learning is facilitated by temporal spacing. Future work may further explore the effects of temporal and contextual distinctiveness of learning experiences on category learning outcomes.

Reply to Sana et al.’s (2022) Commentary on Rest-from-Deliberate-Learning as a Mechanism for the Spacing Effect

Sana and colleagues (2022) have raised a number of challenges regarding the operationalisation of constructs and selection of articles to Chen et al.’s (Educational Psychology Review 33:1499–1522, 2021) suggestion that resting from cognitive activity could possibly allow for working memory recovery and so explain some of the data on the spacing effect. In our response, we indicate that the goal of our proposed framework was to try to resolve some mixed results of the spacing and interleaving effects and offer an alternative explanation for those mixed results, rather than proposing a theory of everything. We acknowledge that there are other important factors, which does not however, provide grounds for rejecting our hypothesis. Additional empirical studies are needed to determine whether rest and its effect on working memory are important when analysing the spacing effect.