ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we review studies aimed to reveal principles of training, which allow us to understand what factors inuence the eciency or speed of training, its durability or retention across long delay intervals, and its exibility or transferability to other contexts or situations beyond those occurring during training itself. Note that our emphasis is on training for performance in well-dened tasks with a major skill component, which can be contrasted with research that addresses more general educational issues. In some of our early training studies, inuenced by the important article of Schmidt and Bjork (1992), we and others have discovered that training that minimizes the time to acquire knowledge or skills may be detrimental to long-term retention (e.g., Battig, 1972, 1979; Healy & Sinclair, 1996; Schneider, Healy, & Bourne, 1998, 2002; Schneider, Healy, Ericsson, & Bourne, 1995; Shea & Morgan, 1979). Likewise, in subsequent studies (e.g., Healy, Wohldmann, Parker, & Bourne, 2005; Healy, Wohldmann, Sutton, & Bourne, 2006), we have found that some training that maximizes long-term retention may severely limit transferability. us, our ultimate goal has been to provide guidelines to trainers that will optimize simultaneously training eciency, durability, and exibility.
