The vigilance of young adults with and without mild mental retardation (MR) was compared, with subjects performing two memory demanding, cognitively based tests. The vigilance decrement of MR adults declined more rapidly than did the vigilance of non-MR adults, due to an interaction between target detectability and response bias, and poor target…

This study investigated the claim that memory for scenes is qualitatively similar in children and adults. The effects of three schema-related processes on scene memory were tested with 5- to 7-year-old and adult subjects. Both children and adults used two of these processes (added unexpected object effect and congruency effect) but not the third…

Presents a model of information processing that demonstrates how to facilitate knowledge acquisition. Various instructional strategies designed to reduce the effect of impositions are described, such as use of novelty, mystery, and questioning techniques; reducing complexity of instructional messages; and the automaticity of secondary skills. (JKP)

Examined the ability of 1-year olds to remember the location of nonvisible targets. Found that infants were able to associate a nonvisible target with a direct landmark and to code its distance and direction with respect to themselves or the larger framework. Difficulty of coding with indirect landmarks was associated with cognitive complexity and…

Examined changes in preschoolers' ability to distinguish among memories of performed, pretended, and imagined episodes, and used source monitoring as a tool for inferring the nature of preschoolers' conceptualization of pretense. Found significant improvements between ages three and four in their ability to distinguish performed actions from…

Discusses studies of the neurobiology of memory and cognition. Presents the findings of anatomic and physiological studies of monkeys that have led to discoveries about the structure of working memory. (MCO)

This study investigated taxonomic clustering and use of frequency associations as features in the semantic memory of children (n=30 in grades two and six) with learning disabilities (LD). Results suggested that, when individual child-generated word lists (i.e., meaningful) are used, children with LD may not be impaired in their ability to utilize…

Students with and without mental retardation from three age groups (ages 6-8, 10-12, and 15-17), were compared on implicit and explicit memory tasks. Students without mental retardation performed better on the explicit memory task, but there was no difference between groups on the implicit memory task. (Author/CR)

Results from an English acceptability-rating experiment are presented that demonstrate that people find doubly nested relative-clause structures just as acceptable when only two verb phrases are included instead of the grammatically required three. Three possible accounts of the results are considered. (Author/VWL)

Explores the extent to which children with specific language impairment (SLI) with severe phonological working memory deficits express knowledge uniquely in gesture as compared to speech. Using a paradigm in which gesture-speech relationships have been studied extensively, children with SLI and conversation judgment-matched, typically developing…

Examined three possible explanations for findings that infants detect textural discrepancies based on individual features more readily than on feature conjunctions. Found that none of the proposed factors could explain 5.5-month-olds' superior processing of featural over conjunction-based textural discrepancies. Findings suggest that in infancy,…

Thirty-six learning disabled (LD) and 36 nondisabled children (mean age = 12) were presented with sentences under either of 2 conditions and then given a recognition and source attribution task. The study concluded that, though LD children did not differ in recognition performance, results did suggest that children with LD possess a general…

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and behavioral measures were used to study the potential effects of individual differences in verbal working memory capacity on the processing of sentences with a local syntactic ambiguity in German. Results indicate that syntactic processes in language comprehension are related to individual differences in…

Three experiments examined children's strategic regulation of memory accuracy. Found that younger (7 to 9 years) and older (10 to 12 years) children could enhance the accuracy of their testimony by screening out wrong answers under free-report conditions. Findings suggest a developmental trend in level of memory accuracy actually achieved.…

The study investigated gender differences in resting EEG (in three individually determined narrow [alpha] frequency bands) related to the level of general and emotional intelligence. Brain activity of males decreased with the level of general intelligence, whereas an opposite pattern of brain activity was observed in females. This difference was…