Second-grade children were given general training in monitoring the utility of strategies, the affective consequences of strategy use, or no strategy-monitoring training. They then performed an associative learning task, first without strategy instructions and then with instructions to use either an effective or ineffective strategy. All training…

To evaluate Mednick's theory of the creative thinking process, an associative priming paradigm was used to measure latencies to lexical decisions primed by associations of low, medium, or high strength with 20 high-creative and 20 low-creative high school students. Mednick's theory that creative individuals show a flatter associative hierarchy…

Describes four experiments that examined the ability of second- and fifth-grade children and college adults to use "extra-list" cues to retrieve episodic information from memory. Shows that effective cue use varied with both the "match" of cue and event classification, and with the associative structure of permanent memory.…

A structural model of emotions was used to reveal patterns in how children interpret the emotional facial expressions of others. Tests with young children and adults indicate that children organize the emotional domain in a systematic fashion, initially according to pleasure and arousal and later in terms of adult-like categories. (Author/AS)

Word associations were used to map high school students' concepts of "chemical equilibrium" and "equilibrium." It was found that the preconception of the two concepts was differentiated on noncritical dimensions. (Author/CW)

Describes two studies in which young children were shown pictures that represented sound with postures and contexts, with conventions, and with combinations of information. Shows that the different types of pictorial representation of sound were not equivalent in their ability to evoke a correct interpretation. (HOD)

Twenty male and 20 female first graders were trained in a paired-associates (PA) learning task to test the hypothesis that instructions to generate interactive mental images of word referents and interactive imagery training administered prior to PA learning facilitate cued recall. Subjects were randomly assigned to one of the following five…

Investigates the contributions of tonal syllables, hand signs, and letter representations of tonal syllables to the development of verbal and symbolic tonal skills of first grade students. Finds no method to be significantly better than another. Concludes that tonal aptitude is the most significant predictor of tonal syllable and pitch…

Although traditional learning theories are based on a demonstrative view of cognition, human beings tend to reason both demonstratively and dialectically. To examine the dialectical theory five studies were conducted. In the first study subjects rated words that could be used as personality descriptors for likability and subsequently learned them…

An earlier study showed that responses are remembered better when subjects produce them from cues, than when subjects read cue-response pairs. The decided memory advantage for generated targets relative to read ones is known as the generation effect. The present research is designed to study the generation effect for cues, following a…

Two experiments investigated the effects of preceding sentence context on the naming times of sentence completion words in third-grade children and college students. In the first study subjects were shown incomplete sentences with four types of target words: best completions; semantically and syntactically appropriate, but less likely completions;…

Two experiments examine the relationships among metamemory knowledge, the use of associative memory strategies such as elaboration, and cued-recall memory. Results show that metamemory development predicted most of the grade difference in cued recall, suggesting that metamemory development may explain improvements in retrieval strategies as well.…

Examines the notion that words are sometimes perceived with greater ease than letters and that word shape sometimes plays a role in the perception of words. The data collected from 40 Israeli kindergarteners revealed that beginning readers found it easier to identify single letters than whole words, thus refuting the above notion. (Author/AS)

This study investigated the possible contribution of pictures serving a representation function to the recall and retention of information presented in written prose passages. The primary variable considered was the durability of picture effects; a second variable concerned the potential effect the presence of pictures had on the recall of…