Attempts to specify whether previously reported limitations on young children's full-report capacity lay in a smaller amount of available information, in a shorter trace duration of information in visual information storage (VIS), or in poorer coding of information into permanent storage. (Author/ED)

Investigates the development of evaluative and taxonomic encoding in 7-, to 8-, and 11-year-old children's memories, and related experimental findings to recent work on the development of encoding in memory. (Author/ED)

Suggests that the iconic memory impairment of retarded subjects is attributable in part to mental retardation and not simply to low mental age. (Author/ED)

Two studies investigated whether variations in the importance of inferences and the salience of premises within a text would affect the probability that the inference would be made. Six stories of about 500 words were used, with eight variations of each story. The target inference, and its plausibility, was constant across all versions. Inference…

Recent publications of longitudinal and sequential analyses of psychometric data have been cited as evidence for "the myth of intellectual decline" with age. This term "myth" has been interpreted by many gerontologists to mean that intellectual functioning does not decline even late in life (except shortly before death). Furthermore, this…

The first section of this report examines, from a developmental perspective, the major theoretical positions dominating the literature on adult cognition. Two criteria are considered. First, how compatible are the theories with the notion that thinking systems develop within specific environments? Second, what are the implicit or explicit…

Definitions of four rare words were read to 259 undergraduates who were asked to record letters and syllables of the words, at the tip of the tongue. Results corresponded to an earlier study, with morpheme-like clusters evident. Results indicate an organizing memory system for words used in speech. (CHK)

Subjects studied and were tested for recognition and recall of target words on lists of cue-target word pairs. List-cued recall was higher than non-cued recall, suggesting that recognition failure is independent of subjects' familiarity with task requirements. This contradicts attribution of encoding specificity phenomena to subjects' confusion.…

Comprehension of a sentence entails constructing a particularized and elaborated mental representation, and this process depends more heavily on knowledge of the world and analysis of context than is generally appreciated. Existing associative or semantic network theories would be strained to accomodate this data. (Author/BJG)

The present study attempted to identify factors associated with memory deficits in 36 learning disabled and 36 normal children in grades 3 and 5. Ss were given free and serial recall tasks and interviewed about their understanding of memory processes. Deficits in the recall of the learning disabled children were found, as expected. Examination of…

The relative importance of spatial-position as a memory aid in a block pattern reproduction task was investigated by analyzing the object-selection and object-placement strategies of 69 nursery school children. Subjects were given a task modeled on Piaget's assessment of Static Reproductive Images and Action that had been modified into a…

A study was conducted to examine the various mental processes that occur during listening. Fifteen volunteers at an eastern United States college listened to a 14-minute taped lecture. The participants pressed a button, connected to a light hidden from their view, each time their minds wandered from the specifics of the lecture. They were then…

"Levels of processing" is an explanatory framework postulating that differences in memory processing quality or effort affect the duration of the memory trace. Using recall (immediate, one week, or two week) for connected discourse processed under three semantic and three orthographic interference conditions, as well as a noninterference…

Thirty-six undergraduate students participated in a two-hour experiment that measured the effect of fact and inference text annotation on the integration of information. The subjects were asked to read four pairs of meaningful stories, each of which contained four pairs of related facts about a mythical country. The texts of the experimental group…

The study involving 60 learning disabled (LD) children (7-10 years old) was designed to determine if LD children go beyond the given information when trying to understand and remember sentences, i.e., do they spontaneously construct inferential relationships like adults and other children, or do they attend to and rehearse individual sentences of…