Examines the role of basic cognitive-processing efficiency as the source of developmental variance in cognitive performance. Two experimental tasks, memory and visual scanning, were used to investigate age effects on the search-processing parameter. Subjects were 9-, 11-, 13-, and 15-year-old children. (CM)

The profiles of 40 educable mentally retarded (EMR) children (aged 6 to 8.5 years) on the McCarthy Scales of Children's Abilities were examined to determine areas of strengths and weaknesses. (Author)

Constructive activity and effects of clarifying context in encoding and retrieval were investigated in a study of memory for mathematical proofs. Results are offered as support of a reconstructive cycle in which context initiates reconstruction; which is redirected or extended by schemata; which is guided by the context. (Author/RD)

Descriptions of cognitive development are determined by the metamodel on which theories and data are based. The associative and information processing approaches have generated much of the research on adult learning and memory. A contextual approach, emphasizing perceiving, comprehending, and remembering, is emerging in the present historical…

Tested the hypothesis that knowledge base development is an important condition for memory development, by using young children and college students in two experiments. (Author/DB)

Developmental dyslexics have difficulty accessing the meaning of written words via phonological recoding due to a short-term memory deficit, although they can access meaning by a direct visual route. Evidence that dyslexia is a genetically-based dysfunction of the interior parietal lobule is reviewed. Implications for remedial instruction are…

Reports on four experiments exploring the relationship between decision difficulty and subsequent retention. (Author/AM)

The extent to which an orienting activity exerts control over the encoding process was studied. Two experiments were reported in which associative meaningfulness was varied under conditions of semantic and nonsemantic processing. Both experiments showed effects of meaningfulness following both semantic and nonsemantic tasks. (Author/MH)

It was hypothesized that the concept of cognitive effort in memory is both useful and important. Cognitive effort was defined as the engaged proportion of limited- capacity central processing. Four experiments were conducted, and the implications and potential applications of the concept were discussed. (Author/MH)

Describes three experiments conducted to examine the superior retention of related word pairs when the second word in the pair required active construction by the subject. The results confirm the importance of subjects' checking solution adequacy and of associative relationships in recall. (PMJ)

Adult age differences in recognition memory for pictures of faces were assessed under different instructional conditions to test the processing-deficit hypothesis. (Author/SS)

This study sought to determine whether differences in cognitive style would be reflected in the quantity of information available in memory. In order to obviate the criticism that differences between impulsive and reflective subjects might be a function of exhaustiveness of search, stimuli were presented for a restricted period. (Author)

Kindergarteners and second-graders were shown pairs of pictures, one picture at a time, and asked to name each picture as rapidly and as accurately as possible. Pictures pairs were of four types which reflected the factorial combination of associative relatedness (high and low) with categorial relatedness (high and low). (SB)

Subjects read a passage and were questioned about the location or content of certain items in the passage. Performance was measured by monitoring response latencies and eye fixations. Apparently the locative information provides an index to the spatial distribution of sentences in the passage. (Author/RC)