With incidental orienting tasks that focus processing on individual words and give no incentive to form associations, distributed presentations produce better free recall than massed presentations¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · causal r? · q2
Currency · newest study 1979 · checked against its sources 2026-10-20 (automated, 1 of 1 entry) · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q2 i? In incidental learning with orienting tasks that forced processing of individual words and gave no incentive to form associations, free recall after distributed presentations was superior to recall after massed presentations, supporting a contextual-component spacing effect. → Glenberg 1979

Evidence¶

Glenberg 1979¶

Glenberg, A. M. (1979). Component-levels theory of the effects of spacing of repetitions on recall and recognition. Memory & Cognition, 7(2), 95-112. https://doi.org/10.3758/bf03197590

q2 · i? · causal · r?

The review reports that Maskarinec and Thompson (1976, Experiment 2) and Shaughnessy (1976) used incidental orienting tasks that forced processing of individual words without incentives to form associations; free recall after distributed presentations beat massed presentations. No effect sizes are printed.

"As predicted, the recall after DP was superior to the recall after MP in both the Maskarinec and Thompson (1976) and the Shaughnessy (1976) experiments."

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• In Experiment 1, the type-of-recall by varied-constant by distribution interaction was significant, with a massed-distributed effect only in constant cued recall and a distribution effect in both free-recall conditions — related
• Spaced Practice Improves Retention — a broader claim this one bears on
• Eliminating differential storage of structural components reduces the free-recall spacing effect at moderate to long lags — related
• The spacing benefit holds even at very short retention intervals, contradicting the Peterson paradox — a broader claim this one bears on
• When the orienting task prevented interitem associations, the within-list lag effect was attenuated after long retention intervals and this attenuation was not a floor effect — reports the opposite
• Preschoolers' recall of repeated items exceeds the maximum predicted by encoding variability theories assuming independent encodings — related
• With constant judgment standards, the same-different orienting task at repetitions did not affect the within-list lag effect, arguing against inattention and encoding-variability explanations — related
• Distributed presentations are recalled better than massed presentations in free recall (the spacing effect), and requiring likelihood ratings does not alter this effect — related
• Unintentional learning of word associations occurs when items co-occur in the focus of attention — related
• A within-list lag effect persisted at all retention intervals (up to 7 days) when the orienting task allowed interitem associations, contrary to what a context-only retrieval account predicts for that condition — related
• Structured CAI with spaced practice and spaced review produced better recall and retention than unstructured CAI — a narrower finding that bears on this claim
• Chen et al. (2018): spaced practice superiority was associated with increased availability of working memory resources — related
• Distributing drill repetitions in time gives better learning results than making many repetitions in succession — related