Influence on memory of the temporal schedule of repetitions over multiple days and its modulation by the retention interval

Abstract

We studied the influence on memory of three temporal schedules of repetitions of vocabulary pairs. Pairs were presented on Day 1, 7, and 13 in a Uniform schedule; on Day 1, 2, and 13 in an Expanding schedule; and on Day 1, 12, and 13 in a Contracting schedule, with schedule as a within-subject factor. Retention was tested with a cued-recall task performed on Day 15, 19 (Experiment 1), or 26 (Experiment 2). Cued recall did not differ as a function of the schedule on Day 15, whereas the Expanding schedule led to the best performance on Day 19 and 26. We interpreted this new finding of a modulation of the effect of schedule as a function of the retention interval within the frame of a model based on the study-phase retrieval theory that accounts for different forgetting curves for different schedules.


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