Study On Spacing Effect And Cognitive Mechanism In Category Learning

As a kind of learning strategy, distributed practice is an important part of self regulated learning. A large number of studies have found that the effect of distributed practice is better than that of massed practice. This phenomenon is referred to as the spacing effect. In the past, the study on the spacing effect is mainly focused on the verbal memory task, such as paired associates, paragraph recall and so on. Memory is an important capability in the human understanding of the world, but in addition to the memory, human understanding of the world also depends on many other abilities, for example by observing examples to learn new concepts or categories, namely category learning ability. The purpose of this study is to investigate the spacing effect in category learning. At present, the research has begun to explore the spacing effect in category learning. But there are two major problems. Firstly, the cognitive mechanism of the spacing effect is not clear in category learning. The existing experimental results are supported by different theoretical models, the attention attenuation hypothesis and discriminative-contrast theory have always been concerned. Secondly, There is still some controversy about the sensitivity to the spacing effect in the metacognitive monitoring. Through the integration of previous research methods, this study comprehensively discusses the cognitive mechanism of the spacing effect and the metacognitive monitoring. This study is helpful to enrich the theoretical model of the spacing effect, and provide practical suggestions for the education and teaching.This study used N. Wahlheim C., Dunlosky, Jacoby and (2011) study of the experimental paradigm, including 4 experiments. Experiment 1 with 29 students as subjects. To investigate the influence of learning styles (massed practice & distributed practice) on the classification performance; Experiment 2 examined the effect of study position on fixation time, and to test the attention attenuation hypothesis. experiment 2a with 29 students as subjects, under the condition of fixed step to examined the effect of study position on fixation time; experiment 2b with 28 undergraduates as subjects, under the condition of self-paced to examined the effect of study position on fixation time; Experiment 3 with 25 students as subjects to examined another theory interpretation of spacing effect:discriminative-contrast theory. Through the experimental study, the following conclusions are obtained:First of all, the classification performance of the distributed practice is significantly higher than that of the massed practice in this research paradigm, which indicates that there are also spacing effects in the classification of natural concepts;Secondly, the results of this study support the discriminative-contrast theory, which does not support the hypothesis of attention attenuation hypothesis.Finally, the category learning judgment and judgement of confidence in distributed practice are significantly higher than the massed practice, which indicates that the subjects in this research paradigm are sensitive to the spacing effect in the process of metacognitive monitoring. In retrospective oral reports, subjects tended to believe that the massed practice was better, and that the subjects were not aware of the spacing effect at the conscious level.