This study was designed to address two issues: "At what age do children spontaneously use a cumulative rehearsal strategy?" and "What effect does the use of the strategy have on their performance?" The subjects, 28 children at each of five grade levels (nursery, kindergarten, first, third, and fifth), were tested in a serial-position recall task.…

The hypotheses of this study include: (1) intentional forgetting, operationalized by a forget signal, will produce augmented recall; (2) highly organized groups of sentences will produce the best recall; and (3) anxiety state will produce a complex interaction with the forget signal and degree of organization variable on the amount of materials…

Recognition errors of children in Grades 2, 4, and 6 were examined. Subjects learned words under intentional or incidental instructions and were tested immediately or 48 hours later. Subjects had to choose a target word from among acoustic, conceptual, associative and neutral distractors. The immediate recognition of 2nd-grade subjects was…

A series of four experiments was performed based on a model of human information processing. The model postulates four stages in the processing of an external stimulus: encoding (stage 1), central processing (stage 2), response selection, e.e. decoding (stage 3), and response execution (stage 4). The total reaction time can be decomposed into two…

Three experiments examined the role of contingent associations in learning double-function, verbal-discrimination lists. Some 15-pair lists were constructed of category instances in such a way that the learning of three contingent associations based on category names would mediate correct performance for all 15 pairs. The first experiment gave no…

The purpose of this research was to experimentally manipulate input and output orders of information and separate storage and retrieval components of prose free recall. The cued partial recall method, used in word list recall, was adapted to a prose learning task. Four short biographical stories of about 55 words each were systematically combined…

Research tested an anxiety reduction technique in a computer-based learning situation. Computer-based situations were used because they permitted controlled studies using materials relevant to the real-life needs of students and allowed repeated measurements of state anxiety in response to learning materials. Thus, the relationships between…

In a series of six experiments, undergraduate college students visually imagined letters or words and then classified as rapidly as possible the imagined letters for some physical property such as vertical height. This procedure allowed for a preliminary assessment of the temporal parameters of visual imagination. The results delineate a number of…

Recent theories of verbal memory have hypothesized that memory for a stimulus is not represented by a unitary memory trace, but rather by a coding on several attributes of the event. The present experiment tested the differential forgetting hypothesis in a unique way. Words were presented either visually (V) or auditorally (A) in a continuous…

The memory model, based on information theory proposed by Moser (see SE 013 578), was used to compare the cognitive processing patterns of second and eighth grade Negro and Caucasian students in solving the "parallel circuits" problem. (Connecting two light bulbs and a dry cell so that when both bulbs light, one bulb can be unscrewed,…

The present study investigated why it is that the more concrete the subject noun phrase of a sentence, the more likely the predicate is to be recalled when the subject noun phrase is the cue. The findings were that concretization dramatically influences both the probability of recognition of the subject noun phrase and the probability of recall of…

This speech reports an experiment on memory and verbal ability. The study notes that in previous research, verbal ability has been found to correlate with sensitivity to order, an important component of intelligence. This relationship may be due largely to the greater word store of high verbal scorers. The author's experimental hypothesis is that…

Two experiments are reported in which subjects performed simple mental arithmetic problems which were presented visually in a sequential fashion. At some point in the presentation of each problem, the sequential display was interrupted and a memory task introduced. The purpose was to validate a measure of transient memory load. (Author/RM)

A negative transfer paradigm was used to assess kindergarten, third-, and sixth-grade children's use of category relations in lists presented for recall. Results showed that negative transfer effects increased with age, with kindergarten children showing no evidence of interference relative to a control group. (Author/MP)

Three possible sources of memory span growth were tested with a modified version of the digit span task. Subjects were 18 students each from first, third, and sixth grades and from college. (Author/MP)