Learning Ebbinghaus 1885 What is the relationship between

Learning

Ebbinghaus (1885) • What is the relationship between practice and learning? • He learned list of 16 novel consonant-vowel -consonant triplets (e. g. , TAV) by reciting them at a rate of 2. 5 syllables per second for either 8, 16, 24, 32, 42, 53 repetitions • Tested himself after 24 hours and measured how long he had to relearn the list to get perfect.

Total Time Hypothesis • Amount learnt is a direct function of the time devoted to learning • Results showed a linear relationship between learning and practice.

But. . . • Learning also depends on: – How practice is distributed – What you do during that time

How should practice be distributed?

Baddeley & Longman, (1978) • Postal workers needed to learn how to type. • Is it better to practice long hours within a few days or shorter hours over more days? • There were 4 groups: 1 session of 1 h per day (1 x 1), 2 session of 1 hours per day (2 x 1), 1 session of 2 h per day (1 x 2), 2 sessions of 2 h per day (2 x 2).

Baddeley & Longman cont. • The results showed that distributed practice groups learned in fewer hours than massed practice groups. – Learning is better if it is spread out over days than if it is spread out over intervals within a few days • But we must also consider practical consideration because the distributed group took the longest time in terms of days.

Distribution of Practice • Learning spread out over time (Distributed practice) is better than learning done all at once (Massed practice)

Melton (1970)

Retrieval Practice Effect • Tulving (1967) – 2 kinds of presentation & test conditions • PT, PT, etc. • PTTT, etc. • Results: – Learning equal in both groups

Retrieval Practice Effect • Successfully recalling an item increases the chance that it will be remembered. • Note that this is somewhat in opposition to the distributed practice effect.

Expanding Rehearsal (Landauer & Bjork, 1978) • Always test at the maximal delay in which the items can still be recalled. • This time will increase as one is learning – hence the term ‘expanding’. – Therefore start with a short delay, and if participant recalls correctly, increase delay whereas if the participant recalls incorrectly, decrease delay.

You can get a good deal from rehearsal, If it just has the proper dispersal. You would just be an ass To do it en masse: Your remembering would turn out much worsal. (Neisser, Quoted in Bjork, 1988, p. 399)

When Distribution of Practice and the Total Time Hypothesis Fail

Neisser (1982) • Professor Sanford (1917) – family prayers – 5000 repetitions over 25 years – poor memory • needed to look up the text every 5 or 6 words

Bekerian & Baddeley (1980) • BBC changed wavelength • Saturation advertising campaign – date of change, wavelength • They studied housewives who would have heard the advertisements well over 1000 times • Recall accuracy was around 17% – 70% of the responses were “don’t know” • Frequent repetition does not guarantee learning

What should we do during learning?

Critical Factors • Attention • Organization • Meaning

Attention • Murdock (1965): Participants were presented with unrelated words while performing a card-sorting task which required attention. • Participants either turned cards over (required little attention) or sorted cards into 2, 4, or 8 categories (requiring increasing amount of attention). • The results showed that recall decreased as cardsorting task difficulty increased. • The same principle applies to pros, pairedassociate learning and free-recall

Learning Without Attention • Sleep-learning • http: //www. hypnotictapes. com/ • Is there any evidence consistent with sleeplearning?

Sleep Learning • There is some learning during sleep but this occurs mainly during periods of relative wakefulness (Simon & Emmons, 1956) • When wakefulness is controlled for by monitoring EEG and presenting material to participants when they are clearly sleeping, there is evidence that a very little bit of information is recalled (Aarons, 1976)

Organization • Organized material is better remembered than disorganized material – Deese (1959): Participants were presented with 3 different kinds of 15 word lists • highly associated, medium associated, and unassociated. • People recalled about 7. 35 words from the highly associated, 6. 08 from the medium associated, and 5. 50 from unassociated.

Organization • People spontaneously attempt to organize disorganized information – Effort after meaning – Bartlett (1932) – Tulving (1962): Participants were repeatedly presented with the same list of worlds but each time in a different random order • Over trials the order of people’s responses became systematized.

Organization • Instructing people to organize material enhances their learning – Mandler (1967): Participants either sorted words into categories (no instructions to learn) or instructed to learn the words – The two groups performed equally well on a memory test

Meaning • Noice & Noice (2000) – 6 male actors vs. Harry Lorayne (mnemonist) – one scene, six manuscript pages – read text and then ‘do whatever they do’ • this was all recorded and then analyzed

Noice & Noice • The Actors – all actors attended primarily to the mental and emotional interactions with other characters – very little deliberate memorization • Lorayne – visualization and linking • e. g. , Kendall Frayne [image of candles raining down]

Noice & Noice “Lorayne appeared to look at the script from the outside, as information to be remembered; the actors appeared to look at it from the inside as a life to be lived” (p. 453)

Levels of Processing (Craik & Tulving, 1975) • Participants were presented with sequences of unrelated words and had to either – decide whether the word was upper or lower case (shallow encoding) – decide whether the word rhymed with another word (intermediate encoding) – decide whether a word fitted into a sentence (deep encoding). • Half of the trials were ‘yes’ responses and half were ‘no’ responses. • The results showed that deeper encoding led to better recognition

Levels of processing cont. • The key aspects of deep encoding are – Elaborative rehearsal – an item is related more richly to previous knowledge – Semantic encoding – The information should be related to previous information at the level of meaning

Levels of Processing & Intention Hyde & Jenkins (1973) • Auditory presentation of 24 common words • Varied – depth of encoding – intention to learn

Levels of Processing & Intention Hyde & Jenkins (1973) • Results – memory performance increased as depth of processing increased – intending to remember did not improve performance