Arguing that skilled reading is the result of the successful acquisition of a number of highly automatic component processes that operate together in an integrated manner, this paper describes a series of studies of good and poor high school readers representing three general domains of processing: decoding, analyzing and comprehending text, and…

A study designed to test the Piagetian theory that distinct stages in the organization of memory relating to horizontality correspond to successive stages in operative level was conducted with 154 twelve- to fourteen-year-old subjects. Loglinear and path analysis models were used to describe the association between operative level and spatial…

A group of 144 kindergarten and third grade students heard stories in which the information necessary to infer the protagonist's motives was varied as to its form and location in a story sequence. In all story variations, the semantic content of the information was held constant. All children completed three tasks: a moral judgment concerning the…

A "release from proactive inhibition (PI) task" method examines the masculine-feminine connotation of a word as an attribute of encoding in memory. Male (N=45) and female (N=61) subjects were given four trials, each trial consisting of three occupations with all masculine or all feminine connotations, a subtraction task, and a recall…

Much research in the area of person perception has dealt with the problem of how people organize information about other people, including how familiarity mediates the cognitive organization of person information. One multi-operational investigation found that information sets about familiar people, as opposed to unfamiliar people, resulted in the…

The current status of conceptions of learning in children is reviewed and some areas of neglect are considered in this paper. The main premise is that although considerable strides have been made in the understanding of the learning process, essential developmental formulations of growth and change have been poorly articulated. It is suggested…

This study investigates (1) the relationship of two potentially valuable measures of sequential processing to each other and to a measure of digit span, and (2) the relationships among tests of sequential processing and other measures of cognitive functioning. Subjects were 188 first grade students who had been screened in kindergarten for risk of…

While reading has been recognized as a potentially useful and enjoyable pastime for the elderly, physical and psychological decrements affect the ability of the elderly to read. As the eyes age, near-point tasks become more difficult. In addition to reduced sensory intake, perceptual changes occur. The central nervous system slows, and data travel…

Forty first-grade children and 40 fourth-grade children participated in a study that sought to determine if age-related increases in memory for prose are due, in part, to deliberate mnemonic strategies and if older children use the higher-order relations in prose more efficiently than do younger children. Each child listened to a tape-recorded…

The measurability of sensorimotor development in 60 severely retarded, institutionalized adults was studied, using the Piagetian concept of object permanence in a delayed recall paradigm that involved special apparatus. Results suggested, among other things, that severely retarded, institutionalized adults learn most efficiently when trained with…

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of age differences and differences in memory load on concept identification (CI) tasks of varying levels of complexity. Previous studies with young children found increasingly better performance on CI tasks with increasing age. This was in part due to the fact that older subjects categorize…

The authors surveyed experts in the field of neuro-behavioral research to determine the directions of progress being made in increasing understanding of neural processing and storage of information. Based on this investigation, their report presents examples of research being pursued in this area. The authors see neuro-behavioral research leading…

This paper is concerned with the question of whether and why individuals who know more about a particular knowledge domain acquire domain-related information more readily than individuals who know less about the domain. A conceptual framework is presented that hypothesizes differences in the memory structure of the high-knowledge and low-knowledge…

Because human memory and thought involve extremely complex processes, it is possible to employ unusual modalities and specific visual strategies for remembering and problem-solving to assist patients with memory defects. This three-part paper discusses some of the research in the field of human memory and describes practical applications of these…

Thirteen graduate students were asked to indicate for each of 24 multiple-choice items whether the item tested "recall of specific information," a "higher order skill," or "don't know." The students were also asked to state their general basis for judging the items. The 24 items had been previously classified according to Bloom's cognitive-skills…