Stimulus meaningfulness, encoding variability, and the spacing effect.

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Abstract
2 levels of intervening task, accomplished by asking 60 undergraduates to count backward by either 3s or 7s, and 2 levels of stimulus meaningfulness (M) for the consonant-consonant-consonant trigrams were combined factorially to study the spacing effect along 6 degrees of lag, ranging from 0-15 sec. Results confirm and extend the finding of R. A. Bjork and T. W. Allen (see record) that the difficult intervening task produced better recall than the easy intervening task. The absolute gain in the recall probability by the introduction of spacing was found to be greater for low-M stimuli than for high-M stimuli. A theory of cue-dependent forgetting plus the encoding variability hypothesis is proposed as a plausible interpretation. (15 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved)

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