Learning and Memory of Knowledge and Skills: Durability and Specificity

Why do people forget some skills faster than others? What kind of training is most effective at getting people to retain new skills over a longer period of time?

Cognitive psychologists address these questions in this volume by analyzing the results of experiments which used a wide variety of perceptual, cognitive and motoric training tasks. Studies reported on include: the Stroop effect; mental calculation; vocabulary retention; contextual interference effects; autobiographical memory; target detection; and specificity and transfer in choice reaction time tasks. Each chapter explores the extent to which reinstatement of training procedures during retention and transfer tests accounts for both durability and specificity of training.