The literature of antonymy, though disjointed and inconclusive, has found that opposition is important to development, learning, psychological health, and creativity. To investigate the role of dialectics in cognitive processes and human learning, four empirical studies were undertaken. In study one, to investigate the dialectic process in…

Ninety-nine preoperational stage children learned 24 pictorial paired-associates at one of three levels of concreteness: low detail line drawings, high detail line drawings, high detail line drawings with a verbal prompt. Within each of these groups, one-third of the subjects received either visual attentional training, no training, or were…

Research suggests that when subjects are given a rule as to how to translate auditory or verbal information into images, the images have many common characteristics with cognitive representations derived from visual perceptions. This experiment examined the process of cognitive integration and the similarities and differences between how imagined…

This study explored the developmental changes in children's effective utilization of verbal versus pictorial stimuli in forming connections between stimulus and response elements in a paired-associate task. A total of 112 children (56 males and 56 females), half of them 4-year-olds and half 8-year-olds, were tested under eight conditions involving…

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…

This study investigated developmental differences in the use of the common features abstraction strategy and the exemplar learning strategy for concept acquisition. Subjects were 30 second graders and 30 fifth graders. The concepts to be learned were two categories of artificial animals which differed on five dimensions. Each dimension had three…

A study-recall paired-associates (PA) learning task was administered to 40 trainable mentally retarded children (6-14 years old) under one of four instructional modeling conditions: imagery, verbal mediation, imagery and verbal mediation, or control. On half of the PA learning study trials, the children were provided with modeled mediating…

Two aspects of allocation of study time were examined among 48 third- and 48 fifth-grade children. Aspects examined were: (1) allocation of more time to more difficult material; and (2) allocation of sufficient time to meet a recall goal. Under a self-terminated procedure, children studied two booklets, one of which consisted of easy or highly…