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In the field of psychology, the spacing effect is the phenomenon whereby animals (including humans) more easily remember or learn items when they are studied a few times spaced over a long time span ("spaced presentation") rather than repeatedly studied in a short span of time ("massed presentation"). Practically, this effect suggests that "cramming" (intense, last-minute studying) the night before an exam is not likely to be as effective as studying at intervals in a longer time frame. Important to note, however, is that the benefit of spaced presentations does not appear at short retention intervals, in which massed presentations tend to lead to better memory performance. The phenomenon was first identified by Hermann Ebbinghaus, and his detailed study of it was published in the 1885 book ''Über das Gedächtnis. Untersuchungen zur experimentellen Psychologie'' (''Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology''). This robust finding has been supported by studies of many explicit memory tasks such as free recall, recognition, cued-recall, and frequency estimation (for reviews see Crowder 1976; Greene, 1989). Researchers have offered several possible explanations of the spacing effect, and much research has been conducted that supports its impact on recall. In spite of these findings, the robustness of this phenomenon and its resistance to experimental manipulation have made empirical testing of its parameters difficult. ==Causes for spacing effect== Decades of research on memory and recall have produced many different theories and findings on the spacing effect. In a study conducted by Cepeda et al. (2006) participants who used spaced practice on memory tasks outperformed those using massed practice in 259 out of 271 cases. As different studies support different aspects of this effect, some now believe that an appropriate account should be multifactorial, and at present, different mechanisms are invoked to account for the spacing effect in free recall and in explicit cued-memory tasks. Not much attention has been given to the study of the spacing effect in long-term retention tests. Shaughnessy (1977)〔Long-Term Retention and the Spacing Effect in Free-Recall and Frequency Judgments John J. Shaughnessy The American Journal of Psychology Vol. 90, No. 4 (Dec., 1977), pp. 587-598 Published by: University of Illinois Press Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1421733〕 found that the spacing effect is not robust for twice-presented items after a 24-hour delay in testing. The spacing effect is present, however, for items presented four or six times and tested after a 24-hour delay. This seems like a strange result and Shaughnessy interprets it as evidence for a multifactorial account of the spacing effect. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「spacing effect」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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