Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

To efficiently learn and retain motor skills, we can introducecontextual interference through interleaved practice.Interleaving tasks or stimuli initially hinders performance butleads to superior long-term retention. It is not yet clear ifimplicitly learned information also benefits from interleavingand how interleaved practice changes the representation ofskills. The present study used a serial reaction time task whereparticipants practiced three 8-item sequences that were eitherinterleaved or blocked on Day 1 (training) and Day 2 (testing).An explicit recall test allowed us to post-hoc sort participantsinto two groups of learners: implicit learners recalled less itemsthan did explicit learners. Significant decreasing monotonictrends, indicating successful learning, were observed in bothtraining groups and both groups of learners. We found supportfor the benefit of interleaved practice on retention of implicitsequence learning, indicating that the benefit of interleavedpractice does not depend on explicit memory retrieval. ABayesian Sequential Learning model was adopted to modelhuman performance. Both empirical and computational resultssuggest that explicit knowledge of the sequence wasdetrimental to retention when the sequences were blocked, butnot when they were interleaved, suggesting that contextualinterference may be a protective factor of interference ofexplicit knowledge. Slower learning in the interleavedcondition may result in better retention and reducedinterference of explicit knowledge on performance.