Time Patterns in Motor Learning

Spacing Repetitions Over Long Timescales: A Review and a Reconsolidation Explanation

“…At the end of training, group 3 performed significantly better than the other three groups. Somewhat similar to Young’s (1954) explanation noted above, Harmon and Miller (1950) attributed the better performance of group 3 to participants initially benefiting from concentrating their sessions to reach a certain threshold of learning and then benefiting from the spacing of sessions to further improve performance.…”

“… Harmon and Miller (1950) had college women who had no prior experience playing billiards learn and practice with different schedules, for a total of 9 sessions. They compared four different schedules: group 1 completed 3 sessions per week for 3 weeks, group 2 completed the 9 sessions across 9 consecutive days, group 3 completed sessions across a gradually increasing interval (i.e., they practiced Day 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and 34), and group 4 completed 1 session per week for 9 weeks.…”

“…This threshold varies depending on the type of task. Additionally, it would be useful to see whether the beneficial effect of gradually expanding the spacing interval found by Harmon and Miller (1950) could be replicated for billiards and other tasks to furnish theoretical accounts of the spacing effect and provide an effective schedule for learning and retaining skills.…”

Rate of Learning in Relation to Spacing of Practice Periods in Archery and Badminton

“…Using the mean gain for each group, the t test 8 for the significance of the difference of means was made. The t obtained for the difference of the scores between Group I and Group II, and the t for the difference in hits (Table 3) indicated that the difference in the gain of the two groups was significant at the 5-per-cent level of confidence for both scores and hits.…”