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Published on: February 19, 2018
The spacing effect in the free recall of homogeneous lists: present and accounted for
Thomas C Toppino1, Yoko Hara, Jessica Hackman
1Department of Psychology, Villanova University, Pennsylvania 19085, USA. thomas.toppino@villanova.edu
Abstract:
Memory performance nearly always improves as a function of the spacing between repetitions. However, previous studies indicated that college students exhibited no spacing effect in the free recall of lists composed exclusively of words sampled from a single semantic category. We explored this puzzling phenomenon in two experiments. We found that the spacing effect in free recall can occur with homogeneous lists. Most interestingly, the effect seems to depend on the number of items (lag) separating spaced repetitions. Short lags between spaced repetitions yield a spacing effect, whereas longer lags do not.
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