Field independence describes the extent to which individuals are influenced by context when trying to identify embedded targets. It associates with cognitive functioning and is a predictor of academic achievement. However, little is known about the neural and cognitive underpinnings of field independence that lead to these associations. Here, we…

Mathematics is an important school subject but one which often poses problems for learners. It has been found that learners do not possess the cognitive capacity to handle understanding procedures, representations, concepts, and applications at the same time. while the extent of field dependency may hold the key to one way by which the working…

Half of a group of 46 younger and 45 older adults watched a slide sequence once (one-trial learning), the other repeatedly (criterion learning). Three weeks later, they were asked questions with misleading information. When event memory was poor for older adults in the criterion group, they were more suggestible. In one-trial learning, younger…

Elderly people show preservation, or even enhancement, of data-driven control but loss of memory-driven control of selective attention. As people grow older they become more labile and more subject to control by external events. Old subjects remember, analyse, and employ smaller samples of the recent past. (Author)

Relates the problem-solving behavior of second, fourth, and sixth graders to conceptual tempo. Correlations with indices of strategic and efficient performance on a pattern-matching task confirmed that reflectives are more strategic than impulsives. A task-analysis identified the sources of inefficiency for each child and related these sources to…

Explored self-serving biases in use of statistical "law of large numbers" (LLN) principle. Found that, on goal-enhancing and goal-neutral problems, adolescents were more prone to schema-based memory intrusions and adults were more prone to exemplar-based intrusions. Both age groups used LLN more frequently on goal-threatening than on…

Forty children listened to stories and then answered questions about temporally neutral and temporally tagged information. Observed interactions among age, additional processing, and kind of information demonstrated the importance of the distinction between these types of information for developmental studies of memory of prose. (Author/DB)

Three groups of boys, aged 6, 9, and 12 years, performed a positioning task with retention intervals of 10 and 30 seconds and visual-plus-kinesthetic or kinesthetic-only cues. Developmental differences were evidenced between the six-year-olds and older boys but not between the two older groups. (Author/SJL)

Assessed age differences in speed of processing verbal and pictorial stimuli in young (N=20) and old (N=20) adults responding to traffic signs. Results showed young adults responded more quickly and all subjects responded more quickly to a verbal standard sign than to a pictorial standard. (Author/JAC)

Tested recognition memory for items and spatial location by varying picture and word stimuli across four slide quadrants. Results showed a pictorial superiority effect for item recognition and a greater ability to remember the spatial location of pictures versus words for both old and young adults (N=95). (WAS)

Examined the effects of orienting task-controlled processing on text recall of younger, middle-aged, and older adults. Younger adults recalled more when recall was intentional or when preceded by a deep-orienting task. Middle-aged and older adults recalled more when recall was intentional regardless of depth of orienting task. (Author)

Resarch on discourse comprehension in adulthood has yielded inconsistent findings. Some studies have reported age-related differences in comprehsnion and recall while others have found no differences between younger and older adults. To examine the recall style of younger and older adults, a narrative was presented to 40 younger (mean age=18.73…

Examined adult age differences in use of context to study and retrieve information. Young and old adults were presented with a series of homographs (targets). Recognition memory for targets was tested. Recognition decreased in both groups as the retrieval context became more dissimilar to the study context. (Author/JAC)

In this study, the self-reported strategies of fifth, seventh, and ninth grade subjects used to learn a list of paired associates were correlated with actual learning performance to test the hypothesis that proficient learners are elaborators. (Author/SB)

Investigated the use of organizational schemes in memorizing prose. Adult organizational schemes were a function of the structure of material to be remembered and the individual's plan to recall the material. Age and sex differences were discovered in an experiment assessing developmental changes in recall plans of children and adults. (Author/DB)