A review of the literature on attribution theory suggests that attributional templates may be similar to balanced structures, in that they are cognitive constructs that have an organizing influence on thought processes and exert a similar organizational influence on the memory for social information. Therefore, the three basic attributional…

Aphasic (N=15) and non-brain-damaged adults listened to and retold two narrative stories three times in succession. Both aphasic and non-brain-damaged subjects were affected by story structure and increased the amount of information retold across retellings. Non-brain-damaged subjects retold slightly more (statistically insignificant) information…

Presents several reconceptualizations of adult cognitive development and its relation to everyday problem solving. Argues that investigation of relations between adult cognitive development and everyday problem solving may be facilitated through causal modeling that includes task characteristics, social context, and personality and motivational…

Examines hypothesis that lack of structural constraint limits children's ability to use context and category cues to search associative memory for episodic information. Second- and fifth-graders and college adults were shown word triplets and asked to recall the final target member of each triplet in a cued recall task. (Author/BE)

Free recall performance of children in grades three, five, seven, and nine and of adults was assessed according to a list of categorically related words. Results indicated that seventh and ninth graders were more apt to use associative relations to begin category clusters than were younger children or adults. (Author/BE)

Three eperiments assessed the effects on strategy transfer of supplements to keyword method instruction; supplements included more comprehensive instructions concerning strategy application, additional practice with strategy during instruction, and combined directions and practice. Generally, results indicated that more explicit instructions are…

In a classification task, preschoolers matched a target stimulus with a conventional category, a visually similar item that cut across conventional categories, or an unrelated item. Items were presented in picture, verbal, and picture-verbal conditions. In all conditions, conventional classifications outnumbered visual ones, and this difference…

Learning and retention of procedural versus declarative memory tasks were examined with 26 young adults with mild mental retardation and 27 school children matched for mental age. The MR adults performed more poorly on both types of tasks, although learning rate and retention over time were comparable, thereby maintaining the control group's…

This study investigated whether phonological working memory was associated with spoken language development in 38 preschool children. Significant differences were found, with children who had good phonological memory abilities producing language that was more grammatically complex, contained a richer array of words, and included longer utterances…

This study examined the effectiveness of using "subject-performed tasks" to improve memory efficiency of eight autistic children. The procedure involved instructing children to carry out and later remember a series of actions. The procedure's effectiveness was attributed to autistic subjects' lack of verbal encoding strategies and…

This report describes the first of three stages in a study in the domain of problem solving: the definition and explication of schema knowledge. One objective of this research is to understand how schema knowledge is acquired and used in the chosen domain. The focus is on ways in which instruction influences the development of specific knowledge…

Explores the central thesis of cognitive science that the mind is an information processor. Discusses the study of reading as an opportunity to gain insight into how that processor works. Provides several examples that illustrate some of the relationships between eye movement, short-term memory, and long-term memory. (TW)

Explores the relationship between teenagers' working memory and school achievement. Experiments revealed significant correlations between the two, specifically in the field of foreign language. Includes descriptions of the experiments with accompanying statistical tables. (MJP)

It has been shown that internally generated (thought or imagination) and externally generated (events, things, or people encountered in the past) autobiographical memories differ in characteristic ways. To examine the consequences of rehearsal on simulated perceived and imagined autobiographical memories, 36 undergraduate students participated in…

Maintains that Teyler and Fountain's presentation (1987) contains several limitations, namely, that the authors do not (1) distinguish between learning and memory, nor between storage and retrieval; (2) address the role of knowledge-based influences in memory and learning; or (3) employ concepts that can accommodate developmental phenomena in the…