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EMPIRICAL ARTICLE
Not Just Stimuli Structure: Sequencing Effects in Category
Learning Vary by Task Demands
Veronica X. Yan and Brendan A. Schuetze
Department of Educational Psychology, The University of Texas at Austin
Attention- and memory-based accounts of sequencing effects in category learning are often pitted against
one another, but we propose that both are important. We created an unsupervised learning task in which the
rules governing categories would be difficult to notice under interleaved sequences. Specifically, parti-
cipants were presented with Chinese characters and their meanings. Category-related characters all shared a
subcomponent (“radical”), but participants had to abstract this rule. No character was repeated. On the day-
delayed test, participants were shown new Chinese characters and asked to select a possible meaning to test
category induction. Under both passive (Experiment 1) and active (Experiment 2) study, we found no
interleaving benefit. However, when we eliminated the demand on attentional processes by directing
attention to the rules (Experiment 3), we obtained an interleaving benefit. We discuss implications for how
sequencing decisions should not only depend on the stimuli but also the learning task.
General Audience Summary
Research has shown that generally when learning new categories, it is best to intersperse examples from
different categories between one another (e.g., ABCABCABC) rather than show examples from one
category at a time (e.g., AAABBBCCC). This finding is called the interleaving effect. In this study, we
show that interleaved study may not always confer an advantage over blocked study when learners do
not have much information about the categories being learned (i.e., unsupervised learning tasks).
Participants were presented with a list of Chinese characters and their meanings and then were shown
new characters and asked to guess at their meanings. What learners needed to discover for themselves in
Experiments 1 and 2, is that these words fit into “categories”(e.g., water-related: rapids, damp, boil,
harbor) and that characters within a category share a common component. We show blocked study (one
category at a time) can help learners notice the shared component; interleaving makes it harder. But
when learners were alerted to the existence of the rules (Experiment 3), interleaving led to much better
performance on the new character identification test. These results highlight the role that sequencing
plays not just in driving learners’attention but also facilitating memory and suggests that instructors’and
learners’sequencing decisions should depend not only on the category stimuli being learned but also on
the specific nature of the learning task being attempted.
Keywords: sequencing, interleaving, category learning, Attentional bias, spacing, Chinese characters
“To do two things at once is to do neither”(Syrus, 1856, p. 13, as
translated from Latin by Lyman). This saying may hold true at many
levels and make strong intuitive sense, but when it comes to learning
categories and concepts, the opposite has often been demonstrated to
be true. Imagine that you are a student enrolled in a statistics class,
and you have four different types of statistics problems (A, B, C, and
D) to learn. Do you focus on learning one problem type at a time
(e.g., AAABBBCCC)? This “one at a time”sequence is referred to
as a blocked sequence and is everywhere in the real world. It is
common, for example, to see course syllabi and textbooks organized
into modules, with students practicing just one type of problem at a
time (Rohrer et al., 2020). Alternatively, do you switch back and
forth randomly between the four different types of problems (e.g.,
ABCBCACAB) in an interleaved sequence?
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
This article was published Online First November 15, 2021.
The studies were conceived and designed by Veronica X. Yan Material
preparation, data collection, and analyses were performed by Brendan A.
Schuetze Both authors interpreted the data and each drafted different sections
of the manuscript. Both have read and approved the final manuscript.
All pre-registrations, materials, raw data, R output and supplemental
materials are available on OSF, https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/3UV7T.
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Brendan A. Schuetze was supported by a Donald D. Harrington doctoral
fellowship. We also thank the members of the SLAM lab for their construc-
tive feedback.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Veronica
X. Yan, Department of Educational Psychology, The University of
Texas at Austin, Austin, United States. Email: veronicayan@austin.ute
xas.edu
Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition
© 2021 American Psychological Association 2022, Vol. 11, No. 2, 218–228
ISSN: 2211-3681 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jarmac.2021.09.004
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