Spearman's notions of mental energy and mental span presage modern conceptions of attentional resources and working memory as fundamental to intelligence. Viewing attention as the conative directing of the intellect, as "the application of intellectual energy," Spearman's quantitative law of mental span deals with limits on the…

In the face of discrimination and oppression, women have utilized self-protective strategies to maintain a positive sense of self. These strategies include attributing negative feedback, when possible, to discrimination rather than to the self. The present study expands understanding of the relationship between stigma and cognitive processes by…

This study examined 4- and 6-year-old children's understanding of the causal relation between the use of a rehearsal strategy and increased recall. In Session 1, children were given two study-recall trials and, on the second trial, were asked to describe their study behavior. In Session 2, children viewed videotaped models and made judgments…

An interpretation is provided of the philosopher L. Wittgenstein's analyses of mental states. The theoretical implications of these analyses for cognitive development and qualitatively oriented researchers are discussed. The mental states examined are: (1) pain; (2) remembering; (3) calculating/adding; (4) following a rule; and (5) reading.…

Research findings suggest the existence of three types of primitive regulation in the behavior of 1 1/2- to 2 1/2-year old children in memory tasks. When children are presented with a game of hide-and-seek to be played with a small stuffed animal, regulatory behavior appears to be related to children's use of stimulus information, precursors of…

Research indicates that people do not spontaneously transfer prior clues to solve problems, even though the necessary information is available in memory. To investigate the effects of the symmetry between clue statements and problem statements on problem solving performance, subjects were asked to provide plausible explanations for five…

An adaptive network model is proposed to represent the structure and processing of knowledge. Accessibility of subjects' stored information was measured. Relationships exist among (a) frequency of verifying a test relation, (b) other relations involving concepts used to evaluate test relation, (c) frequency of verifying those relations. (CHK)

To evaluate the hypothesis that memories are related to operative levels, children were shown pictures involving seriation, horizontality, and verticality and were asked to reproduce them 1 week and 5 months later. Although memories and operative levels did correlate, the relations were quantitatively weak and were undermined by serious…

Monitored the processing activity in the storage and retrieval stages of the information processing sequence. Storage was evaluated by analyses of overt rehearsal; correct responding and order of recall provided data relevant to the retrieval phase. Subjects were third, fifth and seventh graders. (SDH)

Research is reported investigating the processes involved in rejecting certain false categorical statements. (RM)

A major error in cognitive science has been to suppose that the meaning of a representation in the mind is known prior to its production. Representations are inherently perceptual--constructed by a perceptual process and given meaning by subsequent perception of them. The person perceiving the representation determines what it means. This premise…

Various aspects of iconic memory have been studied in the past. Two tachistoscopic experiments were conducted to examine how legibility of a stimulus affects a subject's ability to recall brief visual presentation. The studies used letter arrays set in four different typefaces (Helvetica, Cooper Black Outline, Electronic, Old English). In the…

A series of studies was conducted to determine whether children's reasoning is capacity-limited and whether any such capacity, if it exists, is based on the working memory system. An N-term series (transitive inference) was used as the primary task in an interference paradigm. A concurrent short-term memory load was employed as the secondary task.…

Research has suggested that memory performance may be related to the extent of stimulus processing during acquisition. To examine processing efficiency and processing deficiency differences between younger and older adults, four studies were conducted. In the first study, young and old adults rated word lists, manipulated for generation specific…

The "transitive-chain" theory of syllogistic reasoning proposes that information about set relations is presented in memory by pairs of informational components and that information about set relations is integrated by applying a small set of rules to transitive chains that are found by rearranging informational components stored in…