Repeating an item in a list benefits recall performance, and this benefit increases when the repetitions are spaced apart (Madigan, 1969; Melton, 1970). Retrieved context theory incorporates 2 mechanisms that account for these effects: contextual variability and study-phase retrieval. Specifically, if an item presented at position "i" is…

There are marked individual differences in the formation of cognitive maps both in the real world and in virtual environments (VE; e.g., Blajenkova, Motes, & Kozhevnikov, 2005; Chai & Jacobs, 2010; Ishikawa & Montello, 2006; Wen, Ishikawa, & Sato, 2011). These differences, however, are poorly understood and can be difficult to…

College students estimated the weight of adult women from either photographs or a live presentation by a set of models and estimated the calories in 1 of 2 actual meals. The 2 meals had the same items, but 1 had larger portion sizes than the other. The results suggest: (a) Judgments are biased toward transforming the example in question to the…

By balancing the spacing effect against the effects of recency and frequency, this paper explains how practice may be scheduled to maximize learning and retention. In an experiment, an optimized condition using an algorithm determined with this method was compared with other conditions. The optimized condition showed significant benefits with…