Practice and Retention: A Unifying Analysis

What is the strength of a memory trace that has received various practices at times tj in the past? The strength accumulation equation proposes the following: strength = 2.tj~d, where the summation is over the practices of the trace. This equation predicts both the power law of practice and the power law of retention. This article reports the fits of the predictions of this equation to 5 experiments. Across these experiments, participants received as many as 240 trials of practice distributed over intervals as long as 400 days. The experiments also varied whether participants were just practicing retrieving an item or practicing applying a relatively complex rule. A model based on this equation successfully fit all the data when it was assumed that the passage of psychological time slowed after the experimental session. The strength accumulation equation was compared with other conceptions of the retention function and the relationship of the retention function to the practice function. This article is concerned with an effort to elucidate the relationship between the effects of practice and the effects of forgetting. At least since Newell and Rosenbloom (1981), the practice function has been commonly (e.g., J. R. Anderson, 1982; Lewis, 1978; Logan, 1988; MacKay, 1982) characterized as a power function. When we plot latency to perform a task as a function of number of trials of practice, latency appears to decrease as a power function of the number of trials. The form of this function is

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