If you can't get past nature's paywall, and want more detail... <a href="https://news.brown.edu/articles/2017/01/overlearn" rel="nofollow">https://news.brown.edu/articles/2017/01/overlearn</a><p>tldr:<p>Task: detect which one of the two successively presented images had a patterned orientation and which depicted just unstructured noise.<p>A first group practiced the task for eight blocks, waited 30 minutes, and then trained for eight blocks on a new similar task. The next day they were tested on both tasks to assess what they learned. The other group did the same thing, except that they overlearned the first task for 16 blocks of training.<p>On the next day’s tests, the first group performed quite poorly on the first task compared to the pre-test. Meanwhile the overlearning group showed strong performance on the first task, but no significant improvement on the second. Regular learning subjects were vulnerable to interference by the second task (as expected) but overlearners were not.