Learning melodic musical intervals: To block or to interleave?

Musical interval identification is a valuable skill for holistic and sophisticated musicianship. Yet, discriminating and identifying intervals is often challenging, especially for musical novices. Drawing on cognitive psychological principles, we built two experiments that investigated the utility of interleaving in enhancing novices’ aural identification of melodic ascending intervals. Specifically, we designed a novel programmed intervention during which novices learnt six interval types in an interleaved schedule (different interval types learnt interspersed) and six interval types in a blocked schedule (each interval type drilled several times before proceeding to the next) within a single session. When implemented in combination with familiar reference songs and singing as supplementary learning aids, interleaving and blocking yielded comparable performance on a test requiring participants to classify novel instances of the studied interval types (Experiment 1). However, in the absence of reference songs and singing, a robust interleaving effect emerged—interleaving produced superior musical interval identification than blocking (Experiment 2). Yet, most participants were unaware of the benefits of interleaving, and misjudged blocking to be more effective. These findings highlight the potential influence of context under which interleaving is a beneficial technique for learning melodic musical intervals.

Synthesis and self-assembly of thiol-modified tellurophenes

An asymmetric thiol-modified tellurophene was designed and synthesized, and the ability of the compound to form a monolayer on a gold electrode was confirmed. The surface-active tellurophene was synthesized using Cadiot–Chodkiewicz coupling followed by ring closing and thiol modification. The tellurophene compound forms a monolayer on gold surfaces from a concentrated solution within 24 h. The ability of the compound to conjugate to gold is confirmed by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). A surface blocking experiment was used to evaluate the extent of formation of a monolayer on a gold electrode.

Nonword reading across orthographies: How flexible is the choice of reading units?

It was predicted that children learning to read inconsistent orthographies (e.g., English) should show considerable flexibility in making use of spelling–sound correspondences at different unit sizes whereas children learning to read consistent orthographies (e.g., German) should mainly employ small-size grapheme–phoneme strategies. This hypothesis was tested in a cross-language blocking experiment using nonwords that could only be read using small-size grapheme–phoneme correspondences (small-unit nonwords) and phonologically identical nonwords that could be decoded using larger correspondences (large-unit nonwords). These small-unit and large-unit nonwords were either presented mixed together in the same lists or blocked by unit size. It was found that English children, but not German children, showed blocking effects (better performance when items were blocked by nonword type than in mixed lists). This suggests that in mixed lists, English readers have to switch back and forth between small-unit and large-unit processing, resulting in switching costs. These results are interpreted in terms of differences concerning the grain size of the phonological recoding mechanisms developed by English and German children.

Spatial Separation of Target and Competitor Cues Enhances Blocking of Human Causality Judgements

Three experiments were carried out. Each required subjects to make judgements about the causal status of cues following a two-stage blocking procedure. In Stage 1 a competitor cue was consistently paired with an outcome, and in Stage 2 the competitor continued to be paired with the outcome but was accompanied by a target cue. It was predicted that causal judgements for the target would be reduced by the presence of the competitor. In Experiments 1 and 2 the blocking procedure was implemented as a computer simulation of a card game during which subjects had to learn which cards produced the best payouts. The cues that subjects used to make their judgement were colours and symbols that appeared on the backs of the cards. When the target and competitor cues appeared on the same card blocking effects did not emerge, but when they appeared as part of different cards blocking effects were found. Thus, spatial separation of target and competitor cues appeared to facilitate blocking. Experiment 3 replicated the blocking result using spatially separated target and competitor cues.

Blocking in Pavlovian Conditioning: Effect of Prior Excitatory Conditioning to a Stimulus Extraneous to Compound Conditioning

The effect of prior excitatory conditioning to a stimulus not included in the compound conditioning phase of the typical blocking experiment was assessed in three CER studies. The first experiment, in which rat subjects received A +, C +, or a combination of A + /C + trials prior to AB + conditioning, showed that A + /C + or C + training produced as robust blocking as A + training relative to a control group with no prior conditioning. A second experiment which was designed to assess the role of background cues in mediating the blocking effect indicated that background cues were not responsible for the A + or C + effects, while a third experiment showed these same effects were not mediated by stimulus generalization. The findings of these experiments are interpreted in the context of pseudoconditioning-induced rehearsal of a US representation in short-term memory.

Blocking as a Retrieval Failure: Reactivation of Associations to a Blocked Stimulus

Conditioned lick suppression in rats was used to examine the effectiveness of three different “reminder” treatments in reactivating associations to a blocked stimulus in a Kamin blocking paradigm. Experiment I indicated that with our parameters prior tone-footshock pairings could block manifestation of a light-footshock association that would otherwise be evident following pairings of a light-tone compound stimulus with footshock. In Experiment II, exposure to either the US, the blocked stimulus (light), or the apparatus cues between the compound conditioning trials and testing decreased blocking. Experiments III(a) and III(b) replicated the unblocking effects seen in Experiment II and included control groups that received the identical training and reminder treatments except for the omission of the light from the compound stimulus. These latter animals failed to display behaviour comparable to the blocked and reminded subjects, thereby establishing the associative basis of suppression to the light in the animals reminded following treatment known to produce blocking. Experiment IV also replicated the results of Experiment II and included control groups that received identical light-tone compound trials and reminder treatments without prior conditioning to the tone alone. In these control groups, reminder treatments tended to disrupt rather than increase evidence of conditioning to the light. The results suggest that associations are formed to the added element of a compound despite prior conditioning to the initial element, and that failure on the test trial to retrieve these associations to the blocked CS, rather than a failure to attend to or learn about the added element, is at least in part responsible the Kamin blocking effect.