Timothy Rickard

Abstract Spaced practice in declarative memory tasks consistently yields greater learning than massed practice, but spacing effects are less consistently observed for motor skills.

Abstract Retrieval practice (i.e., practice testing) enhances recall relative to other study methods, but it is still unclear when it helps most. Here, we ask if testing is more beneficial for weakly or strongly related word pairs. Participants studied word pairs with either low or high semantic relatedness, then practiced them using either test-with-feedback or restudy. We gave a final cued-recall test 24 hours later.

Abstract Motor skill learning and performance is driven by the interplay between declarative and nondeclarative systems, which can complement or interfere with one another depending on task demands. In this study, we investigated whether an intervening declarative cued-recall task impairs motor skill performance in a finger-tapping-task and assessed three hypotheses: the consolidation disruption hypothesis, the shared resource hypothesis, and the breakdown of inhibition hypothesis.