Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Research on the timing of learning has revealed that simultaneous and spaced presentations promote childrens generaliza-tion. Why does both presenting information at the same time and apart in time support learning? In this study we addressedthis question by examining the effects of presentation schedules on childrens generalization of science concepts. In Ex-periment 1, children (N = 165) were presented with science concepts on simultaneous, massed, or spaced presentationschedules, and were tested immediately or after a delay. There were no performance differences at the immediate test andchildren had stronger performance on the spaced schedule at the delayed test. Experiments 2 and 3 (N = 87) were con-ducted to determine why spaced learning led to stronger performance; we investigated whether patterns of visual attentionand forgetting during learning varied across conditions. Taken together, this work suggests forgetting is the mechanismthat drives spacing effects in childrens science concept generalization.