Associative learning – The daily blog of behavioral and cognitive economics

Less Experience Leads to Faster Neural Adaptation

For over a century, the cornerstone of psychology has been the Pavlovian idea that we learn through repetition—the more a bell rings before food, the stronger the association. However, a groundbreaking study is upending this 100-year-old assumption. Researchers discovered that the brain actually learns more efficiently when rewards are rare and spaced far apart. Rather than “practice makes perfect,” the brain’s dopamine system prioritizes the timing between events. This discovery suggests that our neural circuitry is designed to extract maximum information from infrequent experiences, providing a new biological explanation for why “cramming” for exams fails while spaced-out learning succeeds. ….[READ]