INTRODUCTION The beneficial effects of spacing practice are well established even when the interval between practice opportunities is filled with other activities (Carlson & Yaure, 1990; Glenberg, 1979). Accordingly, a training program that teaches more than one skill should be able to improve learning by alternating the training of different skills so that the different training tasks serve as spacers for one another. This inference could have important implications for training centers. However, training centers usually teach complex skills, and the inference is based on research that employs simple skills. In the present study, therefore, we tested the inference with representative analogs of complex skills. Specifically, this paper describes a study of the spacing effect in three complex tasks using a schedule of alternating task modules (ATMs) to produce a spaced condition that is isochronal with a massed condition. The present study has three unique aspects. First, we explored the spacing effect simultaneously on three complex tasks with distinctly different cognitive, perceptual, and motor requirements as well as different attention demands. Second, the tasks employed herein all require multiple hours of practice before asymptotic performance levels can be reached. Finally, and most important, using three tasks simultaneously allowed us to test the hypothesis that spacing effects may be achieved by alternating training modules on different tasks. Evidence of a spacing effect in an ATM schedule would have important theoretical and practical implications, which the following sections describe. Theoretical Implications According to several theories of the spacing effect, the nature of the cognitive activities during the interval is more important than the duration of the interval (Carlson & Yaure, 1990; Glenberg, 1979). In fact, these theories suggest that the spacing effect may be enhanced if the interval is filled with a cognitive activity as opposed to serving as an unstructured rest period. Carlson and Yaure's memory reconstruction hypothesis predicts that the spacing effect will occur as long as short-term memory control processes are reloaded each time a task is repeated. Thus an effective spacing interval need be filled with only a task that requires short-term memory control processes. Glenberg's (1979) encoding variability theory holds that alternating tasks will lead to a richer set of global and local contextual cues as well as a richer set of structural cues that benefit retention. Both theories predict a spacing effect in the ATM schedule. The present study may also have implications for generalizing the spacing effect from simple to complex tasks. Many of the theoretical explanations of the spacing effect are based on fairly simple laboratory tasks that can be taught quickly, what we refer to as the microscale. An implicit assumption in much of this research is that the results and theoretical explanations will extend from the microscale to complex tasks, in which learning continues after several hours of training - what we call the macroscale. Corrington (1994) reviewed several of these theories with regard to how well they generalize to the macroscale: reactive inhibition (Ball & Payne, 1988; Hsu & Payne, 1979), memory consolidation (Eysenck & Frith, 1977; Kesner, 1984; Squire & Cohen, 1984), deficient processing (Cuddy & Jacoby, 1982; Hintzman, 1976; Rundus, 1971; Waugh, 1970), long-term memory reconstruction (Carlson & Yaure, 1990; Jacoby, 1978; Lee & Magill, 1983), and encoding variability (Glenberg, 1979; Shea & Zimny, 1983, 1988). Close examination of these theories reveals that some scale up more easily than others. For example, recent formulations of the consolidation hypothesis suggest that the duration of the consolidation process is on the order of hours and days (Kesner, 1984; Squire & Cohen, 1984). Thus this theory seems ideal for explaining the spacing effect on the macroscale. …
['Barry P. Goettl', 'Robert M. Yadrick', 'Catherine Connolly-Gomez', 'J. Wesley Regian', 'Wayne L. Shebilske']
Alternating Task Modules in Isochronal Distributed Training of Complex Tasks