Empirical ArticleThe Robustness of the Interleaving Benefit
Section snippets
Generalizability of the Interleaving Effect
The interleaving benefit has been demonstrated across many different types of concepts and age groups. For example, interleaved study or practice has been demonstrated to benefit the learning of perceptual categories, such as artists’ painting styles (Kang and Pashler, 2012, Kornell and Bjork, 2008), butterfly species (Birnbaum et al., 2013), and chest radiographic patterns (Rozenshtein et al., 2016). Interleaved study has also been shown to benefit the learning of cognitive concepts, such as
Experiment 1
In Experiment 1, we explored working memory (WM) as a moderator of the interleaving benefit in two ways: as an individual difference using a WM span task as our indicator of between-participant differences, and as an experimentally manipulated variable using a dual-task paradigm. In real life, these are important ways of looking at the effect—examining individual WM capacity can tell us about whether interleaving works across participants; examining conditions with and without a WM load can
Experiment 2
In Experiment 1, the stimuli were artists’ paintings. Across the spectrum of WM load (except for when the data were subject to floor and ceiling effects), we found interleaving benefits. In Experiment 2, we replicate the design of Experiment 1, but used different categories—artificially created cartoon fish. We chose these rule-based fish because with stimuli that have clearly defined rules, a ceiling effect in the range of 60–70% (as we think we may have with the artist stimuli) is much less
Experiment 3
In Experiments 1 and 2, we measured individual differences in WM capacity and experimentally manipulated WM load during the category-learning task. Our results indicated a robust interleaving benefit across a large range of task difficulty (spanning from performance at floor to ceiling or near-ceiling). In Experiment 3, rather than identifying a specific type of individual difference, we used an empirically defined source of heterogeneity: the size of the interleaving benefit on an initial
General Discussion
Prior studies have typically examined the average effects of interleaving, ignoring the potential for heterogeneity. Across all three experiments, we were able to repeatedly replicate the interleaving benefit across different stimuli types. These results are consistent with those reported by previous studies. Unlike prior studies, we delved beyond average effects, examining several potential sources of heterogeneity, from the task demands (categories of varying difficulty, working memory task
Conflict of Interest
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Acknowledgements
We thank Derek Stoeckenius, Melissa Walman, and Jingqi Yu for their help in collecting data, and the members of CogFog for their insightful feedback. Aspects of this research were presented at the 57th annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Boston, MA.
Author Contributions
V.X.Y. and F.S. conceptualized and designed Experiments 1 and 2. V.X.Y. conceptualized and designed Experiment 3. Data were collected with the help of research assistants under the supervision of V.X.Y. Data were analyzed by V.X.Y. The manuscript was drafted by both V.X.Y. and F.S.
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