Abstract
The spacing effect is the commonly observed phenomenon that memory for spaced repetitions is better than memory for massed repetitions. To further investigate the role of rehearsal in spacing effects, three experiments were conducted. With pure lists we found spacing effects in free recall when spacing intervals were relatively long (Experiments 1, 2 and 3), but not when spacing intervals were relatively short (Experiments 2 and 3). In contrast, with mixed lists spacing effects emerged at both short spacing intervals and long spacing intervals (Experiment 3). Additional analyses on the combined pure-list data revealed that the correlation between the primacy advantage and the spacing effect in Quadrants 2 through 4 was positive for all-massed lists and negative for all-spaced lists. This provides some first evidence for the zero-sum nature of the spacing effect in pure lists. The need to incorporate assumptions about rehearsal in theories of spacing is discussed.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 35-47 |
| Number of pages | 13 |
| Journal | Journal of Memory and Language |
| Volume | 58 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Jan 2008 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This study was supported in part by an Erasmus University TopTalent grant to the first author. We are grateful to Jos Jooren for his assistance in collecting the data in Experiment 3. We thank Diane Pecher and René Zeelenberg for stimulating discussions about the data presented in this article. Also, we thank Michael Kahana and three anonymous reviewers for the valuable feedback on earlier versions of this article.