Learners typically allocate more resources to learning items that are higher in value than they do to items lower in value. For instance, when items vary in point value for learning, participants allocate more study time to the higher point items than they do to the lower point items. The current experiments extend this research to a context where…

Despite the clear long-term benefits of spaced practice, students and teachers often choose massed practice. Whether learners actually fail to appreciate the benefits of spacing is, however, open to question. Early studies (e.g., Zechmeister & Shaughnessy, 1980) found that participants' judgments of learning were higher after massed than after…

In a series of experiments, participants learned to associate black-and-white shapes with nonsense spoken labels (e.g., "joop"). When tested on their recognition memory, participants falsely recognized as correct a shape paired with a label that began with the same sounds as the shape's original label (onset-overlapping lure; e.g., "joob") more…

In episodic memory tasks, associations are formed between items presented close together in time. The temporal context model (TCM) hypothesizes that this contiguity effect is a consequence of shared temporal context rather than temporal proximity per se. Using double-function lists of paired associates (e.g., A-B, B-C) presented in a random order,…

In a paired-associate learning (PAL) task, Dutch university students (n = 129) learned 20 English second language (L2) idioms either receptively or productively (i.e., L2-first language [L1] or L1-L2) and were tested in two directions (i.e., recognition or production) immediately after learning and 3 weeks later. Receptive and productive…

Students (N = 124) viewed 14 timed Web pages that distinguished 14 confusing word pairs. In a 2 x 2 factorial design, the authors gave all of the students matrices containing representational pictures for each pair of words, as well as examples of each word in use. One factor in the design was the absence or presence of rules of usage for each…