Examines the effects of integration complexity on the ability of child and adult listeners to integrate information. Increases in complexity adversely affected children's more than adults' resolution integration. The children's integration performance was affected by theme discontinuity and conferential complexity. (Author/AS)

This study used the "double easy-to-hard" paradigm to examine the hypothesis that the class inclusion (CI) task should be equivalent in relational complexity to the transitive inference (TI) problem. Participating in the study were 64 girls and 50 boys, with a mean age of 8 years, 6 months. Stimuli for easy versions of the tasks were…

Three problem-solving strategies--working backward from the unknown, forward from the given, and mixed--were applied to interrelated algebra equations. The mixed strategy was most popular and most efficient with grouped variables. Memory load or information-processing load differences among the strategies were evident. (CP)

Four experiments studied effects of difficulty of word identification on optional conceptual processing by second, third, and fifth graders, and college students in a cued recall task. Results indicated that contrastive processing facilitates recall, and that difficulty of word identification may limit the extent of optional contrastive…

Less is known about the effects of normal aging on speech output than other motor actions, because studies of communication integrity have focused on voice production and linguistic parameters rather than speech production characteristics. Studies investigating speech production in older adults have reported increased syllable duration (Slawinski,…

Categorization researchers typically present single objects to be categorized. But real-world categorization often involves object recognition within complex scenes. It is unknown how the processes of categorization stand up to visual complexity or why they fail facing it. The authors filled this research gap by blending the categorization and…

Relational complexity (RC) theory conceptualizes an individual's processing capacity and a task's complexity along a common ordinal metric. The authors describe the development of the Latin Square Task (LST) that assesses the influence of RC on reasoning. The LST minimizes the role of knowledge and storage capacity and thus refines the…

This paper presents a goal-based scenario approach to teaching introductory database concepts to undergraduates using two different scaffolding methods. One method, termed "worked-out examples," attempts to reduce extraneous cognitive load by requiring students to complete increasingly complex missing parts of worked out examples. The other…

This study investigates the influence of changes in the wording of simple addition and subtraction problems without affecting their semantic structure on the level of difficulty of those problems for first and second graders and on the nature of their errors. The objective is to contribute to a better understanding of the process of constructing a…