We used a novel linguistic training paradigm to investigate the experience-dependent acquisition, representation, and processing of novel emotional and neutral abstract concepts. Participants engaged in mental imagery (n = 32) or lexico-semantic rephrasing (n = 34) of linguistic material during five training sessions and successfully learned the…

A robust finding in the literature is that spacing material leads to better retention than massing; however, the benefit of spacing for concept learning is less clear. When items are massed, it may help the learner to discover the relationship between instances, leading to better abstraction of the underlying concept. Two experiments addressed…