In their recent paper, Chen et al. (Educational Psychology Review, 2021) propose that rest periods between deliberate learning characterize the spacing effect and the alternation between skills without rest characterizes the interleaving effect. In this commentary, we show that this theory is inadequate in two aspects. First, the operationalization of their constructs are problematic—their mechanism of rest-from-deliberate-learning mismatches their operationalization (e.g., they code deliberate learning activities that should not allow for working memory recovery as rest-from-deliberate-learning), and their definition of whether stimuli require discriminative contrast appears to depend on the study outcome. Second, their systematic review neglects a large body of literature that is incompatible with their theory. For example, they neglect classic spacing studies on vocabulary learning, and their theory of spacing effects as being a result of working memory recovery cannot account for lag effects or interactions found in the literature. We conclude that there are almost certainly mechanistic differences between spacing and interleaving effects, but the mechanisms are likely not mutually exclusive, as defined by Chen and colleagues.

在他们最近的论文中，Chen 等人。(教育心理学评论, 2021) 提出，刻意学习之间的休息时间是间隔效应的特征，而没有休息的技能之间的交替则是交错效应的特征。在这篇评论中，我们表明这个理论在两个方面是不充分的。首先，他们的结构的操作化是有问题的——他们的刻意学习休息机制与其操作化不匹配（例如，他们将不应允许工作记忆恢复的刻意学习活动编码为刻意学习休息），并且他们对刺激是否需要区分对比的定义似乎取决于研究结果。其次，他们的系统评价忽略了大量与他们的理论不相容的文献。例如，他们忽略了关于词汇学习的经典间隔研究，并且他们将空间效应作为工作记忆恢复的结果的理论不能解释文献中发现的滞后效应或相互作用。我们得出的结论是，几乎可以肯定间距和交错效应之间存在机制差异，但这些机制可能并不相互排斥，正如 Chen 及其同事所定义的那样。