Using Atkinson's Keyword Method--an imagery mnemonic for vocabulary learning--as a vehicle, this paper argues that even the most well-reasoned and explainable psychological outcomes need to be validated empirically. The paper provides 12 examples of applications of the keyword method in which an eminently reasonable cognitive outcome was…

Psychological experiments investigating imposed and induced cognitive strategies are reviewed and related to operations in reading comprehension. It has been suggested that comprehension differences between good and poor readers may arise from the way in which they habitually organize intra- and inter-sentence elements during input.…

Three experiments were conducted to determine the effectiveness of verbal and imaginal rehearsal strategies in children's discrimination learning. With verbal materials, imaging the referent of the correct item was more facilitative than vocalizing the correct item, as long as the former strategy was defined in a manner conducive to effective…

Attempts to identify specific components of a complex associative task, foreign language vocabulary learning, that might be particularly sensitive to developmental differences in imagery generation ability. Subjects were 95 second grade children enrolled in four schools and 90 sixth grade children enrolled in two of these same schools. (Author/MP)

Two experiments investigated the role of children's spontaneous conceptual "biases" in pictorial discrimination learning. The results suggested that such biases may serve either to facilitate or to interfere with discrimination learning. Moreover, in each experiment, age by treatment interactions revealed that in comparison to the behavior of…

To test the comparative efficacy of a visual imagery associative learning strategy in younger and older children, second and sixth grade children were presented a list of paired associates (concrete nouns) either at a faster or slower rate, under either an instruction to generate an interactive image for the pairs or a no strategy, control…

The present study affords an explanation for the consistent, but not always statistically significant, pattern showing superior verbal discrimination learning performance for low- as compared to high-frequency words. In a frequency judgment task it was found that relative to high-frequency words, low-frequency words for which subjects (sixth…

Most popular strategies, including illustrations, for improving prose processing consist of procedures that force attention either to the text's macrostructure or to the organization and interconnections of its propositions. These strategies are assumed to enhance students' comprehension of the text as encoded, as well as to afford students an…

A graph-theoretic paradigm is used to generalize the common measures of categorical clustering in free recall based on the number of observed repetitions. Two graphs are defined: a graph G that characterizes the a priori structure of the item set defined by a researcher, and a graph R that characterizes a subject's protocol. Two indices of…

Children in kindergarten, third grade, and fifth grade were presented a list of either pictures or words (with items presented varying numbers of times on the study trail). In both picture and word conditions, half of the subjects estimated how many times each item had been presented (absolute judgments) and the other half judged which of two…

This summary of a program of research in children's learning describes the effects of pictures and visual imagery on children's cognitive performance. The role of individual differences is highlighted throughout the paper, as are variables which potentially limit the effects discussed. Some of the conclusions were that in a large number of…

Second- and fourth-grade children learned two 25-item, paired-associate mixed lists under three experimental conditions: instructed imagery, imposed imagery, and control. Four specific transfer paradigms and a reference paradigm were represented in the lists. The specific transfer paradigms were constructed such that a first list stimulus term (a…

Investigates the potential of a keyword method extension to determine if it can be effectively combined with other mnemonic strategies that are designed to facilitate coding of numerically ordered information. Twenty references are listed. (MER)

Consistent learning gains are associated with the use of pictures when experiments adhere to five ground rules: (1) prose passages are presented orally; (2) the subjects are children; (3) the passages are fictional narratives; (4) the pictures overlap the story content; and (5) learning is demonstrated by factual recall. (Author)

A study combined a simple mnemonic counting system with the keyword method to determine whether the keyword vocabulary methods can be effectively combined with other mnemonic strategies to facilitate coding of numerically ordered information. This system was then taught to 48 eighth-grade students in the context of learning the names and numbers…