Learning Concepts and Categories

@article{Kornell2008LearningCA,
  title={Learning Concepts and Categories},
  author={Nate Kornell and Robert A. Bjork},
  journal={Psychological Science},
  year={2008},
  volume={19},
  pages={585 - 592}
}
Inductive learning—that is, learning a new concept or category by observing exemplars—happens constantly, for example, when a baby learns a new word or a doctor classifies x-rays. What influence does the spacing of exemplars have on induction? Compared with massing, spacing enhances long-term recall, but we expected spacing to hamper induction by making the commonalities that define a concept or category less apparent. We asked participants to study multiple paintings by different artists, with… 
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391 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
46
Background Citations
207
Methods Citations
50
Results Citations
43

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391 Citations

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Is spacing really the “friend of induction”?
TLDR
The present replication attempt revealed a medium-sized advantage of spacing over massing in inductive learning, which was comparable to the original effect in the experiment by Kornell and Bjork (2008), and the 95% confidence intervals of the effect sizes from both experiments overlapped considerably.
The Spacing Effect in Inductive Learning
Learning general principles from specific examples is a key part of acquiring knowledge about the world. Previous studies of such inductive learning have focused primarily on the generalization…
Understanding and Optimizing the Inductive Learning of Categories and Concepts - eScholarship
TLDR
This dissertation suggests that contrast processing and commonality processing are both critical, but that contrast processes occur automatically, whereas noticing commonalities is a deliberate and conscious process in category learning.
Learning Painting Styles: Spacing is Advantageous when it Promotes Discriminative Contrast
Summary: Repetitions that are distributed over time benefit long‐term retention more than when massed. Recent research has suggested that the advantage of spacing may extend to induction…
In Inductive Category Learning, People Simultaneously Block and Space Their Studying Using a Strategy of Being Thorough and Fair
TLDR
The authors looked at what happens when people are put in control of whether they block or space their own learning, and hypothesized that participants used a “thorough and fair” strategy.
People mind wander more during massed than spaced inductive learning.
  • J. Metcalfe, Judy Xu
  • Psychology, Medicine
    Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition
  • 2016
TLDR
It is suggested that inductive learning may be influenced by mind wandering and that the impairment in learning with massed practice (compared to spaced practice) may be attributable, at least in part, to attentional factors-people are "on task" less fully when the stimuli are massed rather than spaced.
Transfer of category learning to impoverished contexts.
TLDR
It is demonstrated that performance in new, impoverished contexts during test is greater for participants who received an interleaved (vs. blocked) study schedule, both for novel and for studied exemplars.
How Should Exemplars Be Sequenced in Inductive Learning? Empirical Evidence Versus Learners’ Opinions
TLDR
Although participants demonstrated some metacognitive sophistication with respect to the relative benefits of blocked and interleaved study, pure interleaving was the least popular schedule, despite its being one of the most, effective schedules for learning.
The impact of training sequence and between-category similarity on unsupervised induction
  • John P. Clapper
  • Computer Science, Medicine
    Quarterly journal of experimental psychology
  • 2015
TLDR
The present experiments show that the interleaving effect depends on the similarity or alignability of the presented categories, which provides evidence in favour of the category invention hypothesis, which expects that highly dissimilar (nonalignable) categories will resist aggregation and hence will not be affected by interleaved.
Object categories provide semantic representation for 3-year-olds' word learning
TLDR
It is concluded that 3-year-olds learn words best in the presence of variability distributed to highlight both invariant elements of the referent category and those elements that are allowed to vary.
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