The Influence Of Time Interval And Discriminative-contrast On The Interleaved Advantage In Children’s Category Learning

Learning classification has an important influence on children’s physical and mental development.First of all,category learning ability is the focus of children’s cognitive research,and it is the core of children’s development of thinking.At the same time,thinking development also determines children’s language development.Secondly,children need to learn classification to summarize the world around them,and gradually enrich and develop their own category knowledge in the process of growth,so as to better understand and adapt to the world.Finally,category learning can help children identify danger and stay away from danger,so as to avoid themselves from some unnecessary injuries.Early researchers generally believed that massed presentation(continuous presentation of samples of the same category)was more conducive to learning than interleaved presentation(alternating presentation of samples of different categories).Until a study by Kornell and Bjork unexpectedly found an advantage in interleavings.That is,compared with massed presentation,interleaved presentation is more conducive to category learning.This important discovery has aroused great concern among scholars.Since then,a series of studies have compared the learning effects of the two types of presentation and repeatedly verified the advantage of interleaved presentation.Researchers have conducted a great deal of research and discussion on this phenomenon and its internal mechanism.Previous studies have focused on the impact of presentation order on the category learning of adult such as college students,while whether the advantage in interleaved presentation applies to children is unknown.In addition,there is still debate as to why interleaved presentation is more beneficial to category learning.The discriminative-contrast hypothesis holds that interleaved presentation enhances the degree of difference and contrast between different categories,so the subjects are more likely to find the differences between different categories.The retrieval-practice hypothesis holds that in interleaved presentation,when the next stimulus is presented,the previous stimulus of the same category is no longer in the working memory,so the subjects needs to continuously retrieve it from the long-term memory.Retrieved information is easier to recall than unretrieved information.Both hypotheses have corresponding experimental support,but no consistent conclusion has been reached so far.Further exploration of the reasons for the advantages of interleaved presentation in this study can enrich and deepen the relevant theories of interleaved presentation,it can also provide reference for the cognitive development research of children’s thinking,language,logic and other aspects,and provide certain educational and teaching guidance for early childhood educators and parents.This study investigates which presentation mode,massed presentation or interleaved presentation,is more conducive to children’s category learning,and further explores the role of time interval and difference comparison.Three experiments were set up in this study.Experiment 1 examined whether the interleaved presentation advantage still existed in young children.The results showed that the accuracy of category learning in the interleaved presentation group was significantly higher than that in the massed presentation group,indicating that interleaved presentation was more beneficial to children’s category learning than massed presentation.Experiment 2 and Experiment 3 further verified the retrieval-practice hypothesis and the discriminative-contrast hypothesis.Experiment 2examined whether the interleaved dominance in young children supported the retrieval-practice hypothesis.That is,whether interleaved presentation is more conducive to category learning because of the increase of time interval between adjacent cases of the same category.In Experiment 2,two groups were set up: short time interval group and long time interval group.The presentation order of both groups is massed presentation.Among them,the program of the short time interval group is the same as that of the massed group in Experiment 1.The long interval group increases the time interval between adjacent samples,making it equal to the time interval between two adjacent samples of the same category under the interleaved presentation condition.The results showed that there was no significant difference in the accuracy between the long time interval group and the short time interval group.The results do not support the retrieval-practice hypothesis.Experiment 3 examined whether the interleaved dominance in young children was consistent with the discriminative-contrast hypothesis.That is,whether interleaved presentation is more conducive to category learning because the alternating appearance of different categories enhances the degree of contrast between categories.In Experiment 3,there were three groups: massed group,interleaved group and simultaneous presentation group.Among them,the program of massed group and interleaved group is the same as experiment 1,and the simultaneous presentation group is set to be paired with two other samples to enhance the comparison.The degree of difference and contrast between the three groups increased successively.The results show that the main effect of the degree of difference contrast is significant,and the higher the degree of difference contrast,the higher the correct rate of children’s category learning.This result supports the discriminant contrast hypothesis.The study drew the following conclusions:(1)Interleaved presentation is more beneficial to children’s category learning than massed presentation;(2)The length of time interval has no significant effect on children’s category learning accuracy,it shows that the advantage of interleaved presentation is not or not only due to the increase of time interval between adjacent cases of the same category;(3)The degree of difference comparison has a significant impact on children’s category learning accuracy.The higher the degree of difference comparison,the higher the correct rate of children’s category learning.This result supports the discriminativ-contrast hypothesis.