Empirical Article
The Robustness of the Interleaving Benefit

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jarmac.2021.05.002Get rights and content

Interleaving examples of to-be-learned categories, rather than blocking examples by category, can enhance learning. We examine the reliability of the interleaving effect between- (Experiments 1 and 2) and within-participants (Experiment 3). As a between-participant effect, we examined a broad spectrum of working memory by both measuring individual capacity and manipulating the task demand. Findings reveal a robust interleaving effect across the spectrum, eliminated only at the lowest and highest ends, but never reversed. In Experiment 3, we used an empirically defined source of potential heterogeneity by examining whether the size of the interleaving benefit a participant experiences on one set of stimuli predicts the size of the interleaving benefit that same participant experiences on two other sets of stimuli. It did not, with only a very small correlation between the two more similar stimuli sets. Taken together, these results add to the burgeoning literature on the 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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