Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The current study manipulated how frequently different prob-lems were practiced during a first day of practice, with themore frequent items being more closely spaced. Fitting thedata to a skill acquisition model, we find that greater spac-ing between items is associated with an increased probabilityof transitioning to more efficient phases of performance, butwith a shallower speedup within each phase. Three days aftertraining, we find that performance is predicted not by the prac-tice frequency during training, but rather by the phase of skillacquisition attained during training. Thus, it is type of pro-cessing achieved not the amount and spacing of practice, thatdetermines retention. Spacing, however, promotes learning bydriving changes in cognitive processing.